[Bitcoin-development] Proposal: soft-fork to make anyone-can-spend outputs unspendable for 100 blocks
Jeff Garzik
jgarzik at bitpay.com
Sun Jun 2 17:35:10 UTC 2013
On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 2:13 AM, Peter Todd <pete at petertodd.org> wrote:
> I'd say we tell people to sacrifice to (provably) unspendable for now
> and do a soft-fork later if there is real demand for this stuff in the
> future.
That seems fair.
In general, people are actively bloating the UTXO set with unspendable
outputs (that cannot be 100% proven unspendable). Provably
unspendable seems like an improvement on long term UTXO health.
It is a fair criticism that this inches the incentives, a bit, towards
timestamping and other non-currency uses. But those uses (a) cannot
be prevented and (b) have already been automated anyway (e.g. the
python upload/download tools stored in-chain).
I do think the overwhelming majority of users are invested in
bitcoin-the-currency (or bitcoin-the-commodity, take your pick), i.e.
the value proposition. That's our 98% use case. Given the relative
volumes of traffic, timestamping/data storage/messaging is essentially
getting a free ride. So IMO it is worth continuing to explore
/disincentives/ for use of the blockchain for data storage and
messaging, for the rare times where a clear currency-or-data-storage
incentive is available.
--
Jeff Garzik
Senior Software Engineer and open source evangelist
BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/
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