⭐ Merited by ABCbits (1)
Are you talking about public keys with a proof of knowledge of the private key (i.e. a signature) ?
While you can set some output bits by grinding, that would not a little bit less, but MUCH less.
Seems you're correct, I've re-read the relevant part of the mailing list discussion and here Peter Todd argues that it would make the "fake public keys" approach about 6-7 times more expensive regarding fees. But the downside is that according to another post by Sjors Provoost, here, the sizes of the output scripts would increase "dramatically":While you can set some output bits by grinding, that would not a little bit less, but MUCH less.
Quote from: Sjors Provoost
To stop that, you'd have to introduce a rule that only allows spendable public keys to be put on chain. Afaik, the only way to do that is to require a signature. That would dramatically increase the size of all output scripts.
So, to deter spam, we would have more bytes in the blockchain, even in normal "financial" BTC transactions
Basically we would be spamming all the time, only to control that only the "correct" data is published.(Shower thought: could these signatures perhaps eventually be pruned?)
I would not be against such measures if they are well thought out, but making all transactions bigger doesn't look to me that it makes sense.
Ordinals and similar protocols typically come and go like other kinds of fads. They depend on other factors like the current size of the NFT market, and it's possible that NFTs are eventually seen as an outdated concept. I have seen that there are now again more BRC-20 (Ordinals tokens) transactions on the blockchain, but that is probably because they're now using 1 sat/vbyte phases to simply "try out things". Once they see that there's not even profit anymore with that method, also this wave will probably die out.