Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] Relax OP_RETURN standardness restrictions

From: Greg Maxwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 May 2025 09:43:05 -0700 (PDT)

On Friday, May 2, 2025 at 3:28:36 PM UTC nsvrn wrote:

"Spam is annoying but it always runs it course if you ignore it" 
and 
"When relay policy shouldn't be more restrictive than what is actually 
being mined" 

are contradictory statements by gmaxwell. Btw, 99.9% of transactions rn are 
standard, nothing has changed. People are pre-emptively making accomodation 
for a startup with a whitepaper. No one is making relay policy more 
restrictive, they're talking about making it more flexible "pre-emptively". 

I've looked high and low and I can't find any case where I've made the 
first quotation. Can you help me out?  It sounds like a riff on views I 
expressed but I can't find it.

I think your comparison though demonstrates a downside of reasoning in 
broad categories.   High volume nuisance traffic tends to burn itself out 
because the user that is flooding out everyone else has to burn whatever 
everyone else was willing to pay in each block everyone else is displaced 
from-- they run out of money.  But my statement on relay policy doesn't 
have much to do with volume.  A small consistent _small_ stream of 
transactions that aren't getting relayed but get mined anyways brings the 
downsides of having a mining inconsistent relay policy, there doesn't need 
to be a flood. And no flood, no self limiting behavior in any case.

I also think your argument misses the mark in that there isn't a credible 
argument that there is/will-be any traffic floods that the 
proposed-for-removal criteria will *prevent*.  Anyone who wants to stuff 
data into outputs can already stuff an unlimited amount, there are parties 
right now who are currently doing so.  Moreover, there is no credible way 
to stop them from doing so (because you can't distinguish arbitrary data 
from addresses, essentially).   However, if they use OP_RETURN instead it 
will prevent the data from going into the UTXO set.  Maybe they will maybe 
they won't.  But counting this proposal with concerns about 'spam' doesn't 
get us anywhere because removing the restriction doesn't change the current 
situation with respect to 'spam' however you define it.

It doesn't really matter how dire spam is when discussing a proposal that 
doesn't meaningfully *change* the situation around it, except perhaps in 
giving a lever to convert some more harmful traffic into less harmful 
traffic.  If it did then sure the harms of the spam would be a relevant 
consideration.

> People are pre-emptively making accomodation for a startup with a 
whitepaper

I can't speak for others but I didn't follow any links related to citrea or 
any other startup in the thread, I don't think it's relevant.  I have been 
complaining about standardizes rules screwing up block reconstruction and 
direct to miner relationships to bypass relay rules for several years.  My 
impression is that random startup whatever carries precisely zero weight in 
minds of the vast majority of the commenters in favor of eliminating the 
restriction.

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