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Great video from Softfork Mechanic #BIP-110 explaining the current OP_RETURN situation. The choice isn’t between bloating the UTXO set or increasing OP_RETURN, it’s whether we normalize spam or we reject it. Is #Bitcoin for data storage or financial transactions.

94,396 views • 1 year ago •via X (Twitter)

9 Comments

Hexy⚡'s profile picture
Hexy⚡1 year ago

#Bitcoin⚡is sound money, not a storage layer. Instead, changes happen when most of the community generally agrees that a change is safe, useful, and doesn't harm Bitcoin's core principles. While its uses have evolved, Bitcoin's strength lies in its simplicity, stability, and focus as sound money. Let’s respect the protocol and build responsibly around it.

Michael Anton Fischer's profile picture
Michael Anton Fischer1 year ago

New to Bitcoin? ‘Bitcoin Nation’ offers a comprehensive introduction to Bitcoin’s role in fixing economic and social systems. This book explains how Bitcoin can be a solution to issues like inflation and financial instability, making it more than just a currency.

BashCo's profile picture
BashCo1 year ago

@GrassFedBitcoin Honestly if Core developers had been proactive in addressing this spam vector early on rather than dismissing or tacitly endorsing it, we wouldn't be having this discussion today.

Hodl Adu ⛽🤘🃏's profile picture
Hodl Adu ⛽🤘🃏1 year ago

@GrassFedBitcoin OP_RETURN is an attack on bitcoin. Bitcoin is money, no need to be anything else.

Bitcoin Mike 80 IQ Pleb's profile picture
Bitcoin Mike 80 IQ Pleb1 year ago

@GrassFedBitcoin Amazing video!

John S's profile picture
John S1 year ago

@GrassFedBitcoin Exactly, this current discussion is pointless, it’s a small argument in a much larger discussion…core is essentially right to remove limit at a technical level considering the state of things, but the real discussion, and where we need consensus, is financial txs vs data

Samson Mow's profile picture
Samson Mow1 year ago

@GrassFedBitcoin They aren’t right to remove the limit.

satstacker | kolin's profile picture
satstacker | kolin1 year ago

@GrassFedBitcoin Bitcoin is for financial sovereignty. Nothing else. OP_RETURN abuse is an attack on the network. Keep the chain lean and focused on sound money.

Michael Ruiz's profile picture
Michael Ruiz1 year ago

@GrassFedBitcoin This was an excellent breakdown.

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27,890 views • 1 year ago

An interesting thought I had on my morning walk. Filters on their own are not effective to censor all spam from motivated attackers, that's true. But filters do make spam more prone to censorship at the mining pool level. Miners can get away with mining transactions that are used for illegal purposes because they have plausible deniability: they don't know what they are used for, they are "just including what's relayed" by the p2p network. But with many forms of spam, such as OP_RETURN, it is not so. They do not have plausible deniability. MARA is perfectly happy inscribing NFTs and non-standard troll OP_RETURNS via its slipstream service. Since they are legally low risk, it makes sense for them to profit from it. However, if I was to submit something really nasty like torrent links to child pornography (or child porn jpegs) or Mein Kampf (illegal in many countries) MARA could not plausibly deny that it is publishing and distributing illegal content. It’s right there in the OP_RETURN for everyone to see. Consequently they would probably not allow it. If they did, they would get in trouble. And it would be much easier for the content submitters to get caught. If nonstandard node relay software (i.e. libre relay) started being abused by pedophiles, its likely mining pools would just ban these types of higher-risk peers. Of course the pedophiles can always run their own mining pools and get a few transactions every month: bitcoin would remain censorship resistant if you are patient enough. But now, with relaxation of standardness rules and “filters” anybody can easily publish blatantly illegal content as OP_RETURNS and get it relayed to a mining pool in a more censorship-resistant way, cheaper and more effective. Good? Bad? It's possible mining pools are going to have no choice but to develop software that analyzes transaction OP_RETURN to assess what they will publish or not. They may develop content moderation policies, because the illegality of the OP_RETURN content will be blatant and they will have no plausible deniability. I'm honestly pleasantly surprised that miners haven't already done this for obviously "higher risk" transactions like coinjoin. However coinjoin transactions are not illegal per se, and there is very wide international support for financial privacy. Not so for child porn. Once miners start developing software to moderate what transactions go in the blockchain, a Pandora's box is opened: if you can easily filter transactions that have illegal data in the OP_RETURN, why are you allowing whirlpool tx0? Why are you allowing coinjoins? Why are you allowing sanctioned addresses? Ironically, the attempt at making spam transactions less prone to censorship might make economic transactions more prone to censorship. Bitcoin is censorship resistant from a network perspective because anybody can mine anonymously. This censorship resistance is compounded when large centralized mining pools and mining farms have plausible deniability that the transactions they mine aren't blatantly illegal because they are anonymous (“there is no way to know”). The more mining is centralized, the more this component of censorship resistance matters. Non-monetary content puts that aspect at risk. I'm not sure I’m right, but I don't think this idea has been widely discussed. The only thing that can prevent certain txs formats (i.e. the low hanging fruit spam vectors like OP_RETURN) from making it into the chain is consensus rules. Yes I'm aware spammers will always find a way to get spam in eventually. It would be sad to see fork-level consensus to ban OP_RETURN entirely, because there are reasonable harm-reducing use cases for it (e.g. open timestamps). We are nowhere near consensus on restriction spam vectors at a consensus level, not even close. But who knows after 10 years of child porn being distributed via the Bitcoin network nodes and miners both will have had enough. It would be interesting to watch this play out.

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