[Mempool spam] Should we as developers reject non-standard Taproot transactions from full nodes?

Posted by Keagan McClelland

May 10, 2023/20:44 UTC

In a recent email exchange between Bitcoin developers, Keagan McClelland questioned the existence of "non-economic" transactions in the blockchain. He argued that every transaction included in the blockchain is economically motivated because fees are paid for their inclusion. However, he acknowledged that there may be a category of information that constitutes "non-economic" information, and even if means to propagate such information are eliminated, there will always be potential variance in signature data to include it. McClelland suggested that instead of introducing consensus or relay policy to incentivize the expansion of the chain weight these "non-economic" use cases require, the necessary chain footprint of supposed "economically motivated" transactions should be reduced. This is the entire point of all layered scaling tech, according to him. He added that current fees are still significantly lower than they need to be if Bitcoin is going to survive in a post-subsidy era. If our layered protocols can't survive the current fee environment, the answer is to fix the layered protocols.In response, Erik Aronesty proposed a relationship between "cpfp-inclusive outputs" and "fees" to define dust and get a working pr up for the network-layer. He acknowledged that breaking all non-economic use cases would be the point of discussion and that it might be necessary for bitcoin's survival. He also suggested that bitcoin may not be able to be a "global ledger of all things" in order to remain useful and decentralized, and instead, the monetary use case must be its only goal. Aronesty advocated for a rational conversation about the incentives and whether his proposed solution would be an effective enough barrier to keep most non-economic transactions off bitcoin.

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