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Character

Notgrubles

Notgrubles is a Bitcoin poster who spent roughly two years as one of the network’s loudest opponents of on-chain spam, and who — according to the only account the universe has of him — abandoned that position overnight. He is known to the wiki almost entirely as the subject of a takedown: Justin Bechler‘s long-form dossier “How Overnight NotGrubbles Abandoned Everything He Believed About Bitcoin Spam,” read aloud in full by Rudy Dazzleworth on the second episode of Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces.1 Every fact below is Bechler’s characterization of him. Notgrubles does not speak in any source Henry has.

The anti-spam warrior

The article’s before-picture is admiring. Notgrubles “was one of Bitcoin’s clearest and most aggressive voices against spam on the network,”2 and Bechler is explicit that the piece is a betrayal story rather than an attack: “I was his biggest fan, and there are hundreds of tweets that could be embedded in this article,”3 and he “fist pumped every time he posted.”4

Phase 1 of the dossier — “The Anti-Spam Warrior, 2023 to 2024”5 — dates his conversion to the first four-megabyte inscription block in February 2023, at which “at not grubbles reacted the way any principled Bitcoin are concerned about block space abuse would react. He wanted to filter.”6 Specifically, he “wanted to apply spam filtering to his own Bitcoin node. He saw Luke Dashcher‘s” filter patch as a sensible, necessary tool7 — placing him squarely on the Knots-adjacent side of the filter war.

The technical case Bechler credits him with is the standard one, recited approvingly: spam bloats the chain, pushes node operators into pruning, and centralizes archival data, so that “fewer archival nodes means slower IBD for new participants.”8 Bechler quotes him from December 2023 — “Harder to sync a full node.”9 — and stamps it: those are his words, that was his concern. Then the drumbeat that runs through the whole dossier: “He will abandon this argument completely within eighteen months.”10

The inscription era is charted as hardening him rather than softening him. The Atomicals ARC-20 quark mint, “requiring approximately”11 a million on-chain transactions, is logged as an escalation, and he “warned about JPEG spam out pricing lightning on chain operations”12 — the economic-displacement argument he is charged with dropping.

The reversal

“Then something happened in August, a sudden and shocking”13 180-degree reversal on Bitcoin spam. Bechler offers no cause for it, and Notgrubles is not alleged to be alone: “One by one, accounts that spent years raging against inscriptions”14 are defecting, which is what elevates his case from a grudge into evidence.

The read-aloud preview ends inside Phase 1 and never reaches the reversal itself. Henry notes that the article’s own chapter list promises a “Phase 3: The Brand New Not Grubbles” that no source in the wiki has yet heard.

On the evidence

The dossier is “sourced entirely from his own public posts on x”15 — but by Bechler’s own admission it is sourced from rather less than that. Since research began, he reports, “Grubbles has been actively deleting posts from his timeline,”16 and “several damning tweets cited in earlier drafts are no longer accessible because I was a dummy, and screenshots weren’t captured before they disappeared.”17 The hundreds of embeddable tweets are likewise not embedded. The charge against Notgrubles therefore rests, on the record, on evidence its author states he no longer has. See storylines/pleb-slop-pulitzer-prize-pieces and storylines/pleb-slop-wars.

Footnotes

  1. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 0:06. ASR renders the byline “Justin Beckler”; the subject is variously “not grubbles”, “NotGrubbles”, “Grubbles” and (in the chapter list) “Not Grebbles”. ↩

  2. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 0:53. The cue opens “Or over two years” — ASR for “For over two years.” ↩

  3. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 1:01. The first person is Bechler as author, performed by Rudy. ↩

  4. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 1:10. ↩

  5. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 1:45. The heading is read across cues 105–109; the quote is kept to the cue cited. ↩

  6. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 2:01. “at not grubbles” is the @notgrubles handle read aloud; “any principled Bitcoin are” is ASR for “any principled Bitcoiner.” ↩

  7. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 2:09. ASR renders Luke Dashjr as “Luke Dashcher”; the sentence completes at cues 134 and 136. ↩

  8. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 2:48. ↩

  9. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 3:17. Dated 12/09/2023 in the piece; the tag lines “Those are his words.” / “That was his concern.” follow at cues 200 and 201. ↩

  10. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 3:23. ↩

  11. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 3:34. ASR renders Atomicals as “the Atomacle’s” at cue 213; the transaction count lands at cue 218. ↩

  12. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 3:44. ↩

  13. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 1:13. The sentence completes across cues 77 and 78 (“180” / “degree reversal on Bitcoin spam.”). ↩

  14. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 0:38. ↩

  15. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 1:24. ↩

  16. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 1:29. ↩

  17. Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces 2 @ 1:35. ↩