Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Merits 6 from 3 users
Re: Removing OP_return limits seems like a huge mistake
by
d5000
on 17/05/2025, 18:28:03 UTC
⭐ Merited by mikeywith (4) ,vapourminer (1) ,ABCbits (1)
As for direct reach to miners, this is an "extra" service that some pools provide while others don't, and it's really independent of pool size.
Even if this was true (I think still the bigger pools have advantage here, because they are more well-known) I think my problem with that is that still those offering the "spam passthrough" are benefitted with a higher fee average due to the extra fees of Slimstream-style services. It's like the whole incentive system encourages "breaking the standardness rules". Those miners/pools who do it, get more income.

That's a point none of the (pretendedly?) super-angry and borderline conspiracionist defenders of a low OP_RETURN limit has responded to, up to this moment, in this thread.

Furthermore, the whole concept of "small miners" simply doesn't exist in any meaningful scale anymore. 80% of blocks are mined by only six pools, and 90% of blocks are mined by the top nine pools. None of these are small [...]
I agree but I'm worrying about these 10-20%. Or do you think they're all altruist/hobby miners? Of course some of those miners will get priced out "normally" over time, but they could become priced out earlier due to the effect I was describing. It's an acceleration of an existing gradual process.

We can however agree to disagree if you like, it's probably a small effect, but I still don't think it's really "ethically correct".

As for Ocean, last I checked, I believe they were using the Knots template, which filters out inscriptions and limits OP_RETURN data to 42 bytes.
Stampchain uses 34 bytes seemingly for metadata in OP_RETURN, but the rest of the data is stuffed into fake public keys / scripts. See this earlier post.

So no, I don't think it "does the job". This is the most harmful spam, and we can't do anything against it. The Stampchain tx I linked in my earlier post alone creates 28 UTXOs (plus the OP_RETURN which is discarded, and one change output) for a minuscule Pepe image, which will never be spend. Imagine a spam wave based on this technique.

Just a little calculation: Let's say we had a moderate Bitcoin Stamps spam wave with 100 of these transactions per block. That means 2800 "never spendable" fake public key UTXOs per block, 403200 per day, and about 12 million per month.

What's your response to this, angry low OP_RETURN limit defenders? (not aimed at you, @mikeywith, of course Wink )