Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] Re: [BIP Proposal] Limit ScriptPubkey Size >= 520 Bytes Consensus.

From: Anthony Towns <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2025 02:15:37 +1000

On Fri, Oct 03, 2025 at 02:59:32PM +0000, Andrew Poelstra wrote:
> If "it's cheaper to use witness data" were enough of a barrier, nobody
> would be using OP_RETURN outputs today except for opentimestamps and
> maybe some other super-low-load applications.

It isn't chepaer to use witness data until you're publishing more than
~143 bytes of data, due to the overhead of the setup transaction. (It's
also not cheaper if you want extremely easy proof of publication of
the data)

Excluding the couple of months between the topic of increasing the
OP_RETURN limit was raised on this list and the increased limit was
merged into Bitcoin Core master, there have, in fact, been very few
OP_RETURN outputs generated that are above the ~143B size. In particular,
between blocks 900k and 915,843 I get:

  15,003,149 total OP_RETURN outputs
         131 OP_RETURN outputs larger than 83 bytes
          81 OP_RETURN outputs of 144 bytes or more
      19,707 OP_RETURN outputs with non-zero value

cf https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/33453#issuecomment-3341177765

Cheers,
aj

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