Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposal: soft-fork to make anyone-can-spend outputs unspendable for 100 blocks

From: Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2013 13:35:10 -0400

On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 2:13 AM, Peter Todd <[email-masked]> wrote:
> I'd say we tell people to sacrifice to (provably) unspendable for now
> and do a soft-fork later if there is real demand for this stuff in the
> future.

That seems fair.

In general, people are actively bloating the UTXO set with unspendable
outputs (that cannot be 100% proven unspendable).  Provably
unspendable seems like an improvement on long term UTXO health.

It is a fair criticism that this inches the incentives, a bit, towards
timestamping and other non-currency uses.  But those uses (a) cannot
be prevented and (b) have already been automated anyway (e.g. the
python upload/download tools stored in-chain).

I do think the overwhelming majority of users are invested in
bitcoin-the-currency (or bitcoin-the-commodity, take your pick), i.e.
the value proposition.  That's our 98% use case.  Given the relative
volumes of traffic, timestamping/data storage/messaging is essentially
getting a free ride.  So IMO it is worth continuing to explore
/disincentives/ for use of the blockchain for data storage and
messaging, for the rare times where a clear currency-or-data-storage
incentive is available.

-- 
Jeff Garzik
Senior Software Engineer and open source evangelist
BitPay, Inc.      https://bitpay.com/