rented 18.7Mhs for 5 hours = $320
forfeiting the block reward in order to get their oversized transaction mined by themselves since no other miner would have included it in their block template = 0.6XMR ($620)
total $920
https://xmr20.org/mine/#record-verify
Do you think this will catch on any time soon?
598,945 bytes of that transaction sit in tx_extra, a field Monero nodes relay only up to 1,060 bytes At 565 times the limit, it could never pass through the mempool. So we built it into the block's own coinbase transaction and mined block 3,799,494 ourselves
November 5, 2026open privately ↗original on X ↗
I keep seeing this recurring mantra in this thread, and even on the Monero Talk podcast: "If it doesn't hurt privacy, I don't care."
That is like saying "I don't care if banks print money, as long as they don't freeze my bank account." Whether you like it or not, if you don't care about one, you don't care about the other.
Spam is the most sophisticated attack on this network. It sells the fake idea of "volume" and "vitality" while actually poisoning the chain with AI slop. What does that do? It makes node operation costs unviable for everyone. Look at Ordinals and see what that cancer culminated in for BTC.
You care about privacy? I believe you, but privacy is useless in practice if the chain is so bloated that only 3 datacenters can afford to run a node.
All of this is happening because some bullshitt "project" managed to turn the tail emission into a subsidy for miners to destroy the network. That’s how you kill decentralization. I am calling on everyone to fight that cancerous plague.
this is only partially correct because it does hurt privacy. the protocol works because all txns look nearly identical; a bunch of txns with bloated tx_extra fields do not look like the other txns. this makes it notably easier for firms like Chainalysis to perform passive blockchain analysis.
there's also the bloating due to spam, as you said.
the ideological issues surrounding this are debatable, the technical ones are not, and this should be avoided for that reason.
Making the chain unusable is also harmful to privacy. Ultimately the Monero project, devs, and community are committed to the mission of private digital cash. If this gets in the way, it will be addressed. That being said, I think Monero is more insulated from this because we are less dogmatic about block size. Dynamic blocks arguably insulate Monero from this effect to a certain degree. If changes are needed they will be made. There are dogmas and taboos in Monero, but those are Proof of Work, the tail emission size, and privacy. I think those are generally well founded although personally I'm not as dogmatic about the tail emission size and I remain open, but not convinced of alternatives to Proof of Work.
That is the exact same cancer that Ordinals brought to BTC. Peak NGU brain rot. They just proved they have too much money and zero respect for the network — the reason why I swapped all my BTC to XMR.
If the devs don't act, the 0.6 XMR tail emission will just become a subsidy for their spam. This is what the devs should be responding to, instead of the quantum bullshitt.
Its not possible to stop arbitrary data from ending up on a blockchain. The prevention mechanism is to make it very expensive, time consuming, and require a lot of effort. I would say Monero is already doing this pretty well. This entity spent almost $1000, had to rent hashrate, and get lucky enough to mine their own block in order to pull off this stunt. As Monero's price increases, and the hashrate increases, a similar stunt costs even more money, time and resources.
My question "will this catch on" was sarcastic. No one is going to rush to put data on Monero. Mordinals failed, XMR20 will too.
But by all means devs and users should still explore additional ways to make arbitrary data storage even more expensive for those who wish to do so.
and the dev's response to mordinals is working. capping the txextra to 1kb means no miner would accept this block. The entity had to mine it themselves.
Can these people just stop being insufferable and go do this shit on one of the billion other blockchains that work better for this kind of shit? Hell, fork Monero and make fucking Memenero where there's a meme in every block. If NFTs and other stenography on Monero negatively affect the privacy, I'm always against it. If they can do it without hurting Monero's privacy, that's fine I don't care. I wonder how FCMP would affect this.
bawdyanarchist recently talked about how the tx_extra field might be 'misused' and would therefore need to be strongly reduced
I guess it's probably not this, since i can't think how this would make an exploit, but I still wonder what he meant
interesting