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Hi again Murch,
I agree that misunderstandings, often stemming from tribalism, are endemic in this debate. I appreciate your collected approach and thorough explanations.
Not having come from a technical background, I am interested in how technical considerations and their motivations are being communicated. Clearly, there are political undertones in discourses about bitcoin, which necessitates a level of dialogue and understanding that may be hindered by past traumas.
I considered your reply, and although I'm expending myself past my wont, I am nevertheless very interested in responding.
As you have stated, OP-RETURN is not being used for ordinals, inscriptions or BRC-20, and the monkey-picture-people, so ostensibly they won't switch to OP_RETURN because Core removed the limit. Witness scripts seem to be working for them.
OP_RETURN
outputs are not used in Ordinals, Inscriptions, or BRC-20 tokens. I believe that Runes use them, but that use does not require multiple OP_RETURN outputs or OP_RETURN outputs in excess of the current limit.
OP_RETURN
outputs are only cheaper for data payloads of up to 143 bytes and up to 4× more expensive for larger data payloads than inscriptions.
I'm having a hard time reconciling these two statements with the point you made about mining-centralization:
On the other hand, we are seeing more mining pools run with non-standard configurations, accepting largerOP_RETURN
s and other non-standard transactions.
Demand for these non-standard transactions incentivizes the build-out of private mempools and direct submission of transactions to mining pools. It stands to reason that direct submission will predominantly go to the biggest mining pools, the smaller a mining pool, the less manpower they have to run custom configurations, build tooling for direct submission, or be approached by users wanting to submit transactions. Assuming that the hundreds-of-millions monkey-picture industry pays competitive feerates for their non-standard transactions, this directly translates to a business advantage for the largest mining pools.
Do we have data that backs this claim about private mempools, or is this a theoretical argument, only? Initially, it is not self-evident that there is a specific use-case of data-carrying OP-RETURNs (between 83 and 143 bytes) that Core, by removing the cap, is trying to nudge away from making their own private mempools, since if there were, I reckon it would have to be consequentially large and developed in order to outweigh the fees from the witness scripts that smaller mining pools don't have to adjust for.
Also, here you seem to have conflated the jpeg (ordinals) people with those propagating non-standard OP-RETURNs via private mempools, so you may be able to appreciate why the terminology gets muddled in public discourse. Although they may well be from the same companies/camp, in practice, they function very differently, as you illuminated, in a way that may not be very well understood in the bitcoin community, apparently.
Can you blame people for reacting as though Core is attempting to 'solve' a non-existent problem? If Core wants to be proactive about a supposed threat to mining decentralization, then that should be coherent and provable.
reply
datacarrier
has only ever referred to the OP_RETURN size limit, and the opposite narrative is a singular viewpoint by a contributor known for their unique perception of reality.OP_RETURN
outputs are not used in Ordinals, Inscriptions, or BRC-20 tokens. I believe that Runes use them, but that use does not require multipleOP_RETURN
outputs orOP_RETURN
outputs in excess of the current limit. While we are talking about this, I would also like to address the misconception that more use ofOP_RETURN
outputs would increase the blockchain growth: output data is not subject to the witness discount. Data inOP_RETURN
outputs has full weight and would therefore likely push down overall blocksize rather than increase it. While additional transactions with OP_RETURN outputs could increase the competition for blockspace, moreOP_RETURN
outputs cannot cause bigger blocks.OP_RETURN
limit may be causing systemic harm. So, to summarize:OP_RETURN
outputs do not present a DOS vector, do not bloat the UTXO set, and cannot increase the blockchain growth beyond the current blockchain growth (unless blockspace demand were to drop precipitously without it).OP_RETURN
outputs are being included in blocks even though they are non-standard 3.. Fees for non-standard outputs being collected only by the largest mining pools puts smaller mining operations at a financial disadvantage.OP_RETURN
outputs are only cheaper for data payloads of up to 143 bytes and up to 4× more expensive for larger data payloads than inscriptions.OP_RETURN
size limit today is no longer fulfilling its original purpose of curbing blockchain growth, may be slightly harmful for mining decentralization, and only (ineffectively!) serves the paternalistic purpose of one group of Bitcoin users attempting to impose their perspective of acceptable use of Bitcoin on another group of Bitcoin users. While I don’t hold, trade, or otherwise care about any NFTs nor ever have, it seems to me that Bitcoin is many different things to many different people, and either way, the censorship resistance we pride ourselves in works for them in this case.