Hi, This proposal was heavily mediatized, and severe mischaracterizations of the change being proposed led to genuine concerns among the community. A better communication from my part could have avoided unnecessary worries among bitcoiners and a lot of wasted time to everybody.
In an attempt to right this wrong, i have collected objections community members have raised across the board (on Github, the Bitcoin development mailing list, X, podcasts, at conferences, ..) to address them in a single post. I just posted to Delving Bitcoin addressing all concerns and objections i could get my hands on: https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/addressing-community-concerns-and-objections-regarding-my-recent-proposal-to-relax-bitcoin-cores-standardness-limits-on-op-return-outputs/1697. These are actual objections and concerns raised by community members, taken literally with little or no reformulation to address the precise statement. Antoine Poinsot On Thursday, April 17th, 2025 at 2:52 PM, Antoine Poinsot <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > Standardness rules exist for 3 mains reasons: mitigate DoS vectors, provide > upgrade hooks, or as a nudge to deter some usages. > > Bitcoin Core will by default only relay and mine transactions with at most a > single OP_RETURN output, with a scriptPubKey no larger than 83 bytes. This > standardness rule falls into the third category: it aims to mildly deter data > storage while still allowing a less harmful alternative than using > non-provably-unspendable outputs. > > Developers are now designing constructions that work around these > limitations. An example is Clementine, the recently-announced Citrea bridge, > which uses unspendable Taproot outputs to store data in its > "WatchtowerChallenge" transaction due to the standardness restrictions on the > size of OP_RETURNs[^0]. Meanwhile, we have witnessed in recent years that the > nudge is ineffective to deter storing data onchain. > > Since the restrictions on the usage of OP_RETURN outputs encourage harmful > practices while being ineffective in deterring unwanted usage, i propose to > drop them. I suggest to start by lifting the restriction on the size of the > scriptPubKey for OP_RETURN outputs, as a first minimal step to stop > encouraging harmful behaviour, and to then proceed to lift the restriction on > the number of OP_RETURN outputs per transactions. > > Antoine Poinsot > > [^0]: See section 6.1 of their whitepaper here > https://citrea.xyz/clementine_whitepaper.pdf -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Bitcoin Development Mailing List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/qps_M7VTLROH7U1v1n_5snfjf-H-Gl-BX-V9qc1JSzzyqfsRoPrbaCzQAQFa1pU4w0cfXZHVnUta6Z7UryG1hUhtpcGXw1ZHiHOfl3HR2jo%3D%40protonmail.com.
