I have been reconsidering whether the witness discount introduced into Bitcoin in 2017 was a mistake.
While it was originally meant to incentivise SegWit adoption, the discount has had some unintended consequences.
It misaligns incentives, making inscriptions significantly cheaper than OP_RETURN messages.
As a result, arbitrary data is often embedded via inscriptions that create dust UTXOs, bloating the UTXO set.
The removal of the witness discount would require a soft fork.
This would fix spam incentives. Instead of spammers bloating the UTXO set with dust outputs, OP_RETURN would be cheaper and not create any new UTXOs.
This would also return us to an actual 1 MB block limit, like we had before 2017, therefore slowing down chain growth.
It would also have the added benefit of simplifying block space calculations, since at the moment calculating block space is a bit convoluted with some bytes being discounted and others not.
Any thoughts?
might have been a mistake.
Make a poll.
That being said the real fix to all this crap is utreexo. Spam can't be stopped while transactions are cheap which could be a long time, so we need to learn to live with it.
Good idea. Why didn't I think of that: #1405126
Yeah true, would be nice to finally see some adoption of utreexo in major implementations.
Is utreexo still considered as full archival node?
The creation of OP_RETURN in the early days was also a mistake.
Yes, so-called Witness Discount is a mistake.
https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/bug-spammers-get-bitcoin-blockspace-at-discounted-price-lets-fix-it/327
Make the witness discount 100% now.
Witness data is the future. Full discount = much cheaper transactions, more usable block space, and wallets forced to use SegWit Taproot Schnorr. Fees drop, Lightning and layer 2 get way easier, and on‑chain stays for settlement not spam.
It is simple and doable with policy or a soft fork. Stop paying for old heavy transactions. Make witness weight free and let Bitcoin scale.
So you are saying we should uncap the block size limit as long as its filled with witness data?
What you are proposing would require a hard fork.
It is not a very big mistake as described. A small mistake acceptable.