I can produce another analogy 😊

Just kidding.

I played with AI to make some simulations.

So let's assume one could either store garbage at 1sat/vB, or at 10sat/vB (let's say it will be uneconomical to go beyond10 for sick shitcoinining spammers).

Let's also consider that while OP_RETURN has basically just its storage costs, using fake pubkeys carries larger overhead per unit of shitcoinery size, plus each fake pubkey output requires its dust limit 546sats to be locked forever, same thing as paying a fee.

Long story short, no matter the total garbage size (I queried for 1kb, 20kb and 100kb) at 10sat/vB, using fake pubkeys instead of OP_RETURN means spending about 3x the cost per shitcoin size unit, but other than that you're also paying 10sat/vB which is not cheap.

At 1sat/vB (more realistic at current feerates), using fake pubkeys costs a whopping 18x OP_RETURN.

I understand shitcoiners do not care about messing with the UTXO set, but they do care about spending as little as possible.

Are we sure it's a good idea to give them a cheaper, better alternative to do that, which was not available before?

Do you know what the cobra effect was?