Thanks for the help. I’m starting to get my bearings on this.
No worries. There’s a serious long term problem if there’s no fee market for miners. It’s likely the system becomes unstable if there’s not sustained demand for block space. There’s also the short term issue that if there’s no practical place to put “arbitrary” data, then when block space is cheap the market finds a way to put it in there in ways which suck for everyone- especially node runners (UTXO bloat). The argument, as I understand it, is OP_RETURN is the *least bad* place for this stuff to go if that’s what the market wants.
So while we can all be ideologically aligned on P2P money… the reality (as it currently stands) is it is NOT being used that way. Empty blocks in 2025.
I’m in the camp that we should first and foremost build things that help BTC be used as a money (and more specifically a medium of exchange long term). This is exactly why I am all-in on Nostr marketplaces with https://conduit.market
However, I also understand the technical challenge of that monetary reality short term and long term. So I see a practical compromise thru 4kb of OP_RETURN for Nostr metadata which I believe shares and helps BTC’s ideology without sacrificing the vital role of node runners.
BTW I really appreciate the way you approached that question. Cheers.
Discussion
Anytime. Seriously. We need more people to understand what’s really happening