Are you really suggesting that nothing material to this has changed in Bitcoin in a *decade*? Come on…
Discussion
I'm genuinely asking, what (specifically) has changed?
With all the great benefits of segwit (lightening!), it also enabled (made a concession to?) consensus valid 4mb blocks. In this world the potential harm of blocking consensus valid transactions with an insignificant amount of data in an op return should not be something the reference implementation of bitcoin is a party to.
So your logic is the blocks are heavier so fuck it make it possible to go even heavier bc it's a small increase?
I just don't want to see incentives to route around our peer to peer mempools with things like slipstream. As much as possible, I hope all miners can be on a level playing field. Once I finally get my bitaxe setup, I want to be able to compete fair and square. This is obviously on a very small personal level, but when this scales it may be critical to mining and bitcoin's decentralization. It is my understanding that other standardness rules are important for ddos and other attacks. The op return limit is not. I would probably be in favor of a consensus softfork that limited blockchain spam without negative centralization risks. But that is quite unlikely unfortunately. Sadly, 4mb blocks/transactions of crap are possible. Will blocks be heavier without the op return limit? Maybe, but I believe negligibly so. I'm more concerned with centralization risks, utxo set harm (I think this may have a greater impact on costs to run a node than any potential small increase in storage costs.), and making it harder to securely maintain bitcoin core. I'm no one significant here though, and am just regurgitating information. But it is information obtained from multiple well regarded 😉 minds past & present of bitcoin, and it makes sense to me. Best to you and all of us! but I need to step away from this soon. Rainy day, but when that passes, I need some rays!
Why no zap?
I appreciate the thought. I'll get there eventually. I'm an amethyst user on graphene, and that works well for me. I'd like to use ecash for zaps, and was hoping amethyst or another similar client might build in an ecash wallet whose balance I can maintain externally with a lightning wallet. I'm aware of nostr wallet connect, and that may ultimately be the route I take, but my initial desire was to avoid inter app communication on my phone. I think I may be overly concerned though, and just need to get on with it. I do want to join the zap party! Curious to know how you're setup for zaps if you don't mind sharing.
At the time, Bitcoin Core scaled poorly. We didn’t have things like compact blocks and were not really ready to handle actually full blocks. Further, things like Slipstream and Libre Relay didn’t exist so policy wasn’t completely useless, though obviously it still only fairly marginally increased the cost of finding a miner to mine non-standard stuff (though F2Pool was mining non-standard stuff regularly not too much later than this). Finally, there didn’t seem to be a ton of demand for these kinds of transactions, just people exploring backing up their data to the chain, so nudging them away from that was effective (compare to today where it not only wouldn’t be effective, it would harm most miners in favor of MARA) vs today where we have transactors putting crap in the UTXO set to get around the limit, which is obviously much much worse.