I'm genuinely asking to learn. - But couldn't developers already store arbitrary data within the blocks if they wanted to before Segwit? I remember there was a marriage certificate "in the blockchain" and other arbitrary data.
There is an
accepted method of storing arbitrary data in transactions through OP_RETURN that is limited to 80 bytes and is also easily pruned from the UTXO set since they are provably unspendable. Other methods are not acceptable and are damaging like creating an unspendable output that can not be purged from the UTXO set so it remains there forever.
It might be a very dangerous path because, who is "we", and does "we" speak for the whole community?
The same "we" that has been deciding what can or can not be done up to the Ordinals Attack!
For example the same "we" that didn't allow you to inject an arbitrary data as that dummy item that is popped from the stack in the OP_CHECKMULTISIG(VERIFY) op codes.
OK, then what do the "we" propose do to effectively get rid of the "Ordinals Attack"?
Plus have there been proposals from the Core Developers?
I'm genuinely asking to learn. - But couldn't developers already store arbitrary data within the blocks if they wanted to before Segwit? I remember there was a marriage certificate "in the blockchain" and other arbitrary data.
yeah they probably could but using OP_RETURN. limited to 80 bytes. so people can't go crazy. or it will cost them more than its worth to them. a self regulating mechanism.
It might be a very dangerous path because, who is "we", and does "we" speak for the whole community?
thats a good point.
but if we make the basic assumption that bitcoin was meant to do financial transactions and not to store peoples' private data then we is everybody.
But currently, does that basic assumption actually hold true for everyone?
There is an accepted method of storing arbitrary data in transactions through OP_RETURN that is limited to 80 bytes and is also easily pruned from the UTXO set since they are provably unspendable.
To me, this was acceptable until it reached thousands of OP_RETURN transactions per block. See
Mempool Goggles. The larger spam transactions are now replaced by many more small transactions. It's still spam and takes up block space that could have been used
by real Bitcoin users.
A person who uses Bitcoin in a way that you don't approve of, but paid the fees for block space, and followed the consensus rules is not a real Bitcoin user?