op_return spam is beneficial

[Erik Aronesty]

There is a strictly limited supply of money available for spam.  ( Because if we don't assume this, then we have to assume that all financial transactions will get crowded out by infinite funds. )

Every time OP_RETURN is used, instead of other UTXO bearing transactions, at least one UTXO is saved.  UTXO spam is dangerous for decentralization (blockchain spam isn't since blocks are always the same size)

Since spam funds are limited, this is money spent to boost hashpower, and removes money from the spam pool that would otherwise create UTXO bloat. 

Therefore it's irrational to prevent large (or at least multiple) being used for spam.

The only reason to limit this opcode is to "virtue signal that Bitcoin is not intended to store data". 

And while this may have some benefits in the short term given the ongoing social attack against core maintainers, in the long term I think it might have very negative repercussions to cave to a social attack that has little technical merit.

However there is a serious issue with contiguous scriptlubkey data that doesn't have to do with government censorship.

Apparently it is possible to produce L2 protocols that rely on the relay network and unconfirmed transactions.  

We need to be sure that minimum transaction fees are set quite high so that nodes are not relaying transactions that have no intention of being mined or paid for.

[Erik Aronesty]

when blocks aren't full, fees are negligible, miners aren't sufficiently rewarded, and we risk hashpower decline 

if they remain not full, we should probably reduce the block size

and improve the ability to securely share UTXOs so more people can use them 

On Sun, Oct 26, 2025, 5:52 PM nt yl <wrapp...@googlemail.com> wrote:

Hi Erik

As far as I understand - 

Bitcoin blocks aren’t all the same size -  they only share a maximum size limit. 

OP_RETURN outputs don’t actually “save” UTXOs; they just create unspendable outputs that never enter the UTXO set, while still adding to the permanent blockchain size. 

That reduces memory load slightly but increases disk and bandwidth requirements. So it’s not a free trade-off, and it’s misleading to suggest OP_RETURN use has no decentralization cost.

Dr D

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