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527 sats \ 6 replies \ @Murch 4 May \ parent \ on: Quick questions about OP_RETURN? Quick answers here. bitcoin
While most Bitcoin Core contributors do not seem particularly excited about ordinals, inscriptions, runes, or similar projects, most of them appear to agree that the ability to embed data in the Bitcoin blockchain is a product of other characteristics of the Bitcoin network such as censorship resistance and a flexible scripting system.
Fighting "spam" transactions at the mempool policy level is ineffective, especially when such transactions have spent over $280M in transaction fees in the past two years which translates to plenty of financial incentive for mining pools to accept such (consensus-valid!) transactions out-of-band to pad their revenue.
The only way to properly make inroads on curbing spam would be to soft fork out the spam mechanisms. However, even going back to a small amount of whitelisted output script templates would not prevent data payloads in fake pubkeys or fake public key hashes, signatures per grinding, or other transaction fields that can hold arbitrary data.
When inscriptions were discussed as a concern for the Bitcoin network at a Bitcoin Core contributor meeting, the prevalent position was that making this quixotic fight the main priority of the project was not the best use of the project’s limited resources.
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Mempool policy, especially a mempool policy adopted by a minority of nodes, is ineffective at preventing other users with demand for transactions that do not adhere to the policy from being mined. This is demonstrated by the 20+ new OP_RETURN outputs in excess of the limit. As about 18% of the hashrate mine transactions with oversized OP_RETURN outputs, anyone who wants to send one will see it reliably mined if they manage to get it to one of the corresponding miners. They just cannot get it reliably in the next block.
This means that:
- OP_RETURN outputs above the limit get reliably mined and end up in the blockchain
- Large OP_RETURN outputs cannot be preferred over storing data in fake public key hashes or fake pubkeys if the transaction is time sensitive
- Only mining pools financially benefit that offer direct submission and have broken rank from the common network-wide mempool policy
- Block propagation is slowed down on many blocks due to nodes not having all transactions referenced the compact block announcement
So, you don’t get the potential upsides of allowing larger OP_RETURN outputs, but you get additional mining centralization pressures from slower block propagation, and financial incentive to build out direct submission.
At this point, it seems better to make these transactions available to all miners, so at least the miners benefit fairly from the additionally available fees, and so that parties who pollute the UTXO set with unspendable outputs carrying data can at least be encouraged to use OP_RETURN instead as a less harmful option.
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He thinks it's bad that spammers have to pay typically higher fees out of band. This seems to be the common argument given in favor of the PR.
In reality this is a direct result of the spam filter working. Spamming should be expensive as possible.
They take the desired outcome and twist that to be the reason why we should get rid of filters.
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You made the argument above. You said it's not fair that some miners benefit from high fees from out of band transactions, i.e. the spam transactions that exceed the op_return limit.
"At this point, it seems better to make these transactions available to all miners, so at least the miners benefit fairly from the additionally available fees..."