I am new to Bitcoin development but curious, interested, and happy to learn new things. I would like to discuss ideas for preventing and reducing blockchain bloat. Like many of you, I desire that Bitcoin remain as decentralized as possible. That means we probably want to make it easier to run full nodes that don’t require much more than 800 GB of storage space over the course of many years.
FWIW, cost to run Bitcoin full node is much lower than cost to run node for current top 100 altcoin by market cap.
Do you think it’s possible to modify the Bitcoin Core and other software to make certain transactions go through a specific consensus of node operators before minors are allowed to process them? It seems like many people running nodes might be more reliable because there’s less chance of them getting monetarily incentivized to corrupt the blockchain.
While it's theoretically possible to propose extreme fork which do these,
1. Treat script
OP_FALSE OP_IF ... OP_FALSE as invalid.
2. Add size limit to script size.
3. Treat OP_RETURN with data bigger than
X bytes as invalid.
4. Treat new UTXO that contain less than X satoshi as invalid.
Such fork is very unlikely to be accepted. And if it does, some spammer will continue to add arbitrary data using fake address at higher cost.
Is it possible to detect transactions that contain large UTXOs, large numbers of public keys (some may be fake, and we don’t know which ones are fake), or other attributes that may identify a transaction as harmful?
AFAIK no. Although i recall there were few discussions here that talks about theoretician address format which make fake public key/address become more expensive.