by prateekposwal

I’ve been working through a question that I think is genuinely open, and I’d like feedback from this community on whether the framing is useful.

Question: Does Bitcoin’s fee market correctly price the lifetime cost of permanent data storage?

Look, BIP-141 (SegWit) created a 4× weight discount for witness data. This was designed to fix transaction malleability, not to price state growth. The discount made inscriptions (Ordinals, Runes, BRC-20) economically viable at scale. This was an unintended side effect of a different design goal, and nobody has seriously asked whether the weight formula appropriately prices the cost of adding permanent state to the network.

I built a UTXO cost model using publicly available data. Source code and full verification appendix at [ GitHub - prateekposwal/bitcoin-priority-oracle: Open research: does Bitcoin's fee market price the lifetime cost of permanent data storage? Surveying state expiry, UTXO pricing, and relay policy. · GitHub ]( GitHub - prateekposwal/bitcoin-priority-oracle: Open research: does Bitcoin's fee market price the lifetime cost of permanent data storage? Surveying state expiry, UTXO pricing, and relay policy. · GitHub ).

...read more at delvingbitcoin.org