Sorry? Is this happening now as we speak?
Discussion
people have been storing data in bitcoin since the beginning. I wrote a bash one liner for extracting the whitepaper from the utxoset, even without txindex on.
That is the worst kind of spam since it permanently bloats the utxoset (unprunable). Luckily we have unfiltered op_return to encourage people not to do that.
Yes, storing data, but seems one of the biggest issues is what the data is.
having consensus code that discriminates different types of data would be a consensus nightmare (chaotic hardfork generator)
So consensus code that limits the size of the data would be better?
yes of course, that would prevent large op_returns, but it would push people into storing large amounts of data in worse ways, like multisig outputs, witness data, etc.
I like eriks analogy here:
“Look, no one wants garbage on the timechain, but people are gonna litter.
So, we can either make garbage cans for garbage (i.e. op_return) and people can put their garbage there, or people will put their garbage on the streets (UTXOs) b/c there are no garbage cans.”