A satirical, fully client-side live visualization of the Bitcoin "spam war." Real mempool transactions charge a castle gate — THE BLOCKCHAIN — defended by the Filter Knights (Luke-jr, Bitcoin Mechanic, Matthew Kratter). Their filter shots bounce off. Blocks confirm. The spam gets in anyway. A scoreboard keeps the receipts, and every single sprite is a real transaction you can click through to mempool.space.
The defenders are noble, earnest, and completely ineffective. Policy is not consensus. Bitcoin Knots can filter your transaction; the next pool mines it. BIP-110 can schedule a soft fork; the monkeys keep confirming without missing a block. The site commits to the pro-spam bit in its copy while staying technically accurate — and it discloses exactly how it works.
Three unit archetypes come out of one classifier:
- VIOLATORS — inscriptions, BRC-20, Stamps, big OP_RETURNs, large runestones — the charging JPEG horde (would violate BIP-110 if it were active).
- INFILTRATORS — data protocols that are BIP-110-compliant anyway, mostly small Runes — they stroll through the checkpoint legally, briefcase in hand, while the knights seethe. This gap ("spam" ≠ "noncompliant") is the best joke in the project.
- CITIZENS — clean payments (and ≤83-byte functional memos) — waved through.
Nothing here is fabricated; only the framing is a joke. The "How this works" modal spells this out in the app, but in short:
- Full-block scans for headline numbers. On each new block the browser fetches the raw block and classifies 100% of its transactions — no first-100 sampling bias. Violator counts, spam weight, and blockspace share come from these full scans.
- Rules applied flat. BIP-110 is real but not active. All seven rules are checked against every transaction and labeled "would violate BIP-110 if active." Grandfathering (pre-activation UTXOs) is not applied — there is no activation height yet.
- "Observed" is sampled and labeled as such (the live mempool percentage).
- Faces are cosmetic — protocol → faction pool → random face. The protocol, matched rule text, and txid are the real parts.
- Knots node share is disputed (~20–25% of reachable nodes, opponents call it Sybil-inflated).
- Data courtesy of mempool.space. No backend — your browser talks to the public API directly and politely (≤1 REST req/sec sustained, one WebSocket).
Zero build step. Serve the folder statically over HTTP (ES modules need a real
origin — opening index.html via file:// will not work):
python3 -m http.server 8080
# then open http://localhost:8080Static site on Vercel (project bitcoin-spam-war):
npx vercel deploy --prodvercel.json sets cleanUrls and a 5-minute cache on /js and /css. It
deliberately adds no headers that would restrict outbound connections —
the site must be able to reach mempool.space and its mirrors.
- Live data courtesy of mempool.space and its public mirrors (mempool.emzy.de, mempool.bitcoin.de).
- Inspired by Bitcoin Battlefield by Nick Greenawalt.
- BIP-110 — "Reduced Data Temporary Softfork" — is a real proposal by the pseudonymous Dathon Ohm (original draft credited to Luke-Jr). Read it: bip-0110.mediawiki · bip110.org.
Nothing here is committed — ideas in rough priority order:
- Fork-watch readiness — the site's two natural traffic moments are block 961,632 (mandatory signaling begins, ~Aug 7 2026) and 965,664 (max activation, ~Sep 1). A "FORK WEEK" banner, a signaling live-ticker set-piece, and load-testing before those dates.
- Analytics — Vercel Web Analytics (cookieless, served first-party from
/_vercel/insights/script.js): flip the project toggle + one script tag. - Custom domain and posting the link places where Puritans can see it.
- True inscription art — resolve the actual inscription in a reveal tx (via an ord indexer API) and show that image on the unit instead of a cosmetic collection sample.
- Per-knight stats — kill attribution leaderboard (still 0 kills each).
- Trench Chat upgrades — NIP-07 extension sign-in for real Nostr identities, a client-side mute list, kind-41 channel metadata refresh (requires the channel creator key, held offline).
- Historical replay mode — "watch block 840,000" (the 37-BTC-fee Runes halving block) replayed through the battle engine.
- Scale path if it ever goes viral: Cloudflare Pages (free bandwidth) or Vercel Pro for hosting; a fan-out relay server or self-hosted mempool instance to take per-visitor load off mempool.space.
MIT for the code (see LICENSE). Collection artwork under
assets/pfps/ belongs to its creators — sources in
assets/pfps/sources.json.
Parody of a public policy debate among public figures — playful, not defamatory. All transactions shown are real. No filters were harmed. Not affiliated with mempool.space. 100% BIP-110-noncompliant website.