Quote from: ETFbitcoin on June 15, 2022, 12:11:52 PM

Your statement is misleading. Bitcoin protocol only check whether the address is valid or not.

The only way to know if an address is valid or not is to know a private key for it. Dont know that? Then you don't know if its valid address. When you use the word "valid" what you mean is just passing a simple checksum test which doesn't prove anything. I think you would be making a leap of faith to then conclude that just because it has the right "format" therefore a private key does indeed exist. maybe a small leap of faith but nonetheless still a leap of faith...

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You forget to quote this part, "Despite this, OP_RETURN has the advantage of not creating bogus UTXO entries, compared to some other ways of storing data in the blockchain."[1].

I didn't forget that part, it certainly is true but what do you think about this:

On OP_RETURN: There was been some confusion and misunderstanding in the community, regarding the OP_RETURN feature in 0.9 and data in the blockchain. This change is not an endorsement of storing data in the blockchain.

And then this:

Storing arbitrary data in the blockchain is still a bad idea; it is less costly and far more efficient to store non-currency data elsewhere.

So they seem to be saying go ahead and misuse bitcoin to store data if you like we dont want you to but if you do then op_return works best. it's like they caved into the demand to store data by offering op_return but then chided people for considering to use it anyway. I bet satoshi wouldn't have been too excited about people using op_return or any mechanism to store data on chain.

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If it's that big, it's likely you imported wallet with lots of transaction. Besides block header, Electrum also download merkle proof to prove the transaction on block[2]. It's cost when you don't want to blindly trust someone else.

not alot of transactions at all. maybe only 2 or 3. if that. well i thought electrum would be like a wallet that didn't need to download a huge amount of blockchain data. it's a nice software but that kind of dampered my enthusiasm for it.

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We could block it, but we don't want that. It is possible to require making a valid signature before receiving something, as it is in Grin, but that would make our life harder. And still, it is impossible to prove that someone still has the keys. It is always possible to generate some keys, receive something, and then remove the keys, making coins "trapped".

But at least that way, everyone would know that someone at some point did know a private key for it. So no one would send funds to it thinking that it was a "burner address". I don't know why people send funds to popular burner addresses in the first place.

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There is a difference. If you pay your fees, and your coins are moved, then the UTXO set is not bloated, because you will sooner or later move your coins. It is possible to attack Bitcoin by sending a lot of outputs with zero satoshi (or dust amounts, but zero satoshi is more dangerous, fortunately, only miners can do that) to some trap addresses, then you can almost entirely disable pruning, just by making the UTXO set very large.

So a rouge miner could wreak havok on the bitcoin network by stuffing their block with zero satoshi transactions. Wonderful! When are they going to start doing that?

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You don't want to see the version of Bitcoin that will make it harder. It is technically possible, but you don't want that. But if nodes will be spammed, then the community will move into some other fee model, maybe UTXO-size-based model (then, you will get a discount for consuming UTXOs, and you will pay additionally for creating a lot of UTXOs, just to prevent spam).

Unfortunately in life sometimes the good apples have to play by rules that were put in place to get control over the bad apples. But in reality when you look back on things, you realize that if this particular bad apple hadn't done something bad, another bad apple would have most likely and then you would still need the rule in place anyway.

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I think you don't want that "change the closing time to 30 minutes earlier". Here, it could be a different fee model, and I think it could be more expensive to spam the UTXO set then. And you don't want that, because it could also hit some website that want to allow withdrawing coins by making one huge transaction with large number of outputs, one output per user. By spamming the network, people will make developers and node operators angry, and the network will change the fee model to prevent spam. You don't want that.

that's kind of an edge use case wouldn't you think? sending a large # of outputs in a single transaction. not what most users are doing. no one made the ethereum devs and node operators angry and look what happened to their fee situation. it went through the roof. no one wanted that but it happened. what happens when they can't get it right as far as the fee goes is people seek alternatives.