This poll is related to #1405004
I have been reconsidering whether the witness discount introduced into Bitcoin in 2017 was a mistake.
While it was originally meant to incentivise SegWit adoption, the discount has had some unintended consequences.
It misaligns incentives, making inscriptions significantly cheaper than OP_RETURN messages.
As a result, arbitrary data is often embedded via inscriptions that create dust UTXOs, bloating the UTXO set.
The removal of the witness discount would require a soft fork.
This would fix spam incentives. Instead of spammers bloating the UTXO set with dust outputs, OP_RETURN would be cheaper and not create any new UTXOs.
This would also return us to an actual 1 MB block limit, like we had before 2017, therefore slowing down chain growth.
It would also have the added benefit of simplifying block space calculations, since at the moment calculating block space is a bit convoluted with some bytes being discounted and others not.
Any thoughts?
Yes42.1%
Maybe21.1%
No36.8%
19 votes \ 3h left
Onchain JPGs shouldn’t be the metric by which consensus rules are evaluated
It's "easy" to reverse, because fees are policy.
The witness discount is consensus. You can fit up to 4 MB of witness data into a block per consensus, since 4 MB of witness = 1 vMB.
What prevents a miner to unilaterally implement, today: I from here on price per byte including witness (no discount) and my block templates will from now on be 1MB including witness data?
Nothing prevents a miner from omitting transactions from their own block template. They will just make less money in fees compared to other miners that do fill up the block to 4000000 weight units according to the current consensus rules.
At a pool aggregate, you're correct. At an individual miner level, if you don't want to mine something, then you don't mine something - yes you may leave sats on the table, but under a global consensus you may simply be forced to do that.
So although I am in the "yes it was suboptimal, in hindsight" camp, it's more important to not meddle and have stability than to change it every time we perceive something to be suboptimal, unless something is truly at stake. If we change incentives with the direction of the wind, Bitcoin development becomes like the Fed, and Bitcoin becomes like Ethereum.
Long-term stability is Bitcoin's greatest asset, even if that means that there will be periods where we have spammers or other unwanted hype. Those often die off automagically.
Yes
Probably depends on if you think UTXO bloat is damaging or not.