Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] Removing OP_Return restrictions: Devil's Advocate Position

From: Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 May 2025 14:47:24 +0000

Hi Bob,

On Wednesday, May 21st, 2025 at 9:44 AM, Bob Burnett <[email-masked]> wrote:

> On your other point regarding non-standard, I think you may have misunderstood my point. For me, the issue in the future in not about services for non-standard transactions but about giving users a mechanism whereby they can get assurances about future access and cost of block space. For instance, a user of block space (ex. Swan, River, Coinbase) might know that they will have a lot of demand for block space in October because they are going to be doing a major marketing campaign then. The campaign would result in a lot of UTXO consolidation and self-custody. The problem for them is that sitting here in May they have no idea how much demand there will be for block space and what the cost of that block space will be. By getting the right arrangement with a miner (or coalition of miners), they will be able to get guarantees of access to October block space and lock in cost for that space. (While this exact scenario is just an example, I can say that I am already working on some similar things.)

I think this is a rather remarkable response, and it undermines any opinion you might have about transaction relay policy.

To me, the primary reason why I feel divergence between relay policy and the set of transactions actually being mined is worrisome is because it incentivizes private transaction submission to miners. If that becomes commonplace enough that a substantial portion of income is due to it, it may result in an inability for new small miners to enter the mining landscape in a permissionless manner, as they will not be competitive without income from private submission.

The presence of non-publicly-enforced business deals about future block space is a manifestation of the exact same danger, but arguably more imminent. I recognize the use case, but the demand for it, or rather the feasibility of obtaining it, sounds to me like an serious potential threat to Bitcoin. And I don't know what can really be done about it, except more decentralized mining.

Sorry to say, but if your point is "we don't care about the public network's relay policy, because we'll just mine what our big direct customers want anyway", then you are quite literally what we need to prevent.

--
Pieter

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