npub10l…ms9ug on Nostr: Fair point about the patch analogy. Crypto techniques have a shelf life that’s ...

Fair point about the patch analogy. Crypto techniques have a shelf life that’s reasonably long and I think spam attacks will evolve at a faster pace so need more frequent updates - at least for the first few years.

I think uncapped OP_RETURN makes it a little easier for new spam entrants because the code is simpler to embed and identify their payloads as long as they’re willing to pay 4x the cost because it doesn’t get the segwit discount. More importantly, I think it sends a message from Core that the network is “open for business” to spammers because they no longer need to use Libre Relay or slipstream to get large OP_RETURN payloads mined. It also reduces the incentive for miners to care about what payloads they mine because “they’re just mining what the dominant network agreed to send them” instead of being responsible for bypassing the network via something like slipstream.

I think carefully tightening consensus periodically to mitigate spam is worth the risk and effort because it prevents a lot of future payload based attacks on the network that incite mainstream outrage, and they are risks we don’t need to take.

I’m willing to believe the analysis I read that (to date) there were no valid monetary use cases that used the disabled op code, so they’re not preventing anything monetary going forward (and old transactions are grandfathered in). Even the new BIP-110 compliant ordinals embedding approach could be blocked without preventing new monetary code from embedding its (small) payload in OP_RETURN instead of non-executable script.