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I will gladly civilly debate anyone on the OP_RETURN saga over audio. I believe I have found the ulterior motive for why these spammers want to force their limitless OP_RETURN policy settings on as many nodes as possible and can clearly articulate why this BIP should be closed for good and never be opened again.

Right now for a spammer to get a tx with over 80 bytes in the OP_RETURN they would have to go out of band to miner that will include their transactions in the next block they find. The miners that offer this service to spammers only find a small percentage of blocks which means these spam transactions can only occur every so often. If all bitcoin core node runners were to remove the OP_RETURN limits then all miners would see these spam transactions and include them in their block template making the spam occur regularly.

These guys can fork core and make this change but that doesn’t help because they NEED as many nodes as possible to propagate their txs so they have a higher chance of it being included in the next block.

Big Barry Bitcoin 8mo ago

Here's what I've collected. I feel like it boils down to this.

For:

1. Users want to degen and they are creating unprunable dust.

2. An OP_RETURN limit removal might incentivise them to use prunable utxos.

3. Unofficial relay alternatives already exist for non standard transactions and may continue to develop, reducing the transparency of bitcoin, (making it harder to identify attempts of real censorship?)

Against:

1. Filters are decentivising degen in general.

2. Removal might increase non-monetary usage of our Bitcoin nodes.

3. This does not prevent spammers from intentionally creating unspendable dust.

4. Non standard transactions has always been a thing, we can add to the standard list or expand the definition of standard when we need, but we don't have them for no reason. Why not make any valid transaction standard?

I put a part of it in brackets because I haven't heard anyone explicitly say this, I've heard "it will make it less decentralized" which is a sweeping statement IMO. But I feel like this is what the devs are pointing out, they're just not saying it. Regardless, it is something to consider.

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Discussion

:P 8mo ago

Nice assessment! The only thing that will be more decentralized would be spam. They are arguing that the spam itself is not decentralized. Like you mentioned there is a reason for the limit. It’s a feature not a bug. The other thing is storing data in the SW is cheaper but more harmful why would spammers voluntarily pay more to spam the network?

Big Barry Bitcoin 8mo ago

I don't think that is their argument, IMO those words in that order makes no sense. "Spam itself is not decentralized"?

Are you saying point blank that they WANT more diverse types of transactions on the blockchain?

That might be so.

Either way, I lean your way honestly. It is concerning that there is not a lot of different use cases being thrown around other than Citrea as far as I can tell.

Big Barry Bitcoin 8mo ago

So new context...

When mentioning decentralization, I have heard a clarification explaining that they were thinking about miner decentralization.

Still, I can't shake the feeling that you can't call a PR purely technical when it is a change that affects game theory. In this case the game theory as to whether a minority of miners will gain an advantage by capitalising on a private market that the overall network applies friction too otherwise.

This wasn't just a change from an int to a long, or the parallelisation of actions. This is a change that has external effects and that should affect whether you ack or nack.