I thought this was an interesting note about how a potential outcome of the Bitcoin network. Sounds something like the holy grail IMO. Bit it's changed my perception slightly on the op_return/spam debate.
Doesn't look like Waxwing is on SN so I'll forward any zaps to him on nostr.
As early as 2016-17 I remember having this rather fantastical "vision" of Bitcoin as just a kind of "beacon" - just 32 bytes every 10 minutes, and some unimaginably huge number of financial systems "hooking" off that, principally using zero knowledge proof techniques to make it so that, magically, just that one 32 byte string every short while would be enough to ensure correctness of everyone's transactions.
This fantastical way of looking at things is a cousin of Todd's "client side validation" idea. What remains on chain is just essentially random junk, to an outside observer, but to those engaged in financial transactions using it, it ensures fairness. This addresses scalability (because all the bulk of computation, storage and interactive bandwidth usage remains "offside"), addresses privacy.
Recent handwringing about data-on-chain illustrates one side of this vision is really, really important: the idea that somehow we won't need to store megabytes and megabytes of data per 10 minutes in order to have fully trustless validation on our own sovereign node, that we have the "right" Bitcoin sitting on it. Recent work on zkSTARK based initial-block-download (see: zeroSync) is a push in that direction. Imagine you started from scratch, were given the genesis block from Jan -09 and then the latest chainstate (admittedly this is currently in the GBs but, anyway!), and then a proof - and what it proves is that the entire set of state transitions from the start to the end, followed the correct consensus rules all the way.
If that gets properly cleaned up and actually works, it will eliminate the idea of storing data in the blockchain, but not eliminate the idea of storing data in the utxo set (or "chainstate") - unless zk techniques take another leap forward into the fantasy i mentioned at the start - that you need no more than 32 bytes to represent global state somehow (merkle trees, especially sparse ones, gives a flavor).
To put it in much shorter terms, we already kinda know how to compress out all the history (it's developing science). What's left is to compress out all the present. Then all the issues of scalability, privacy and "pollution" (I reject even the concept, but if it goes away, who cares) of the state of Bitcoin.
To reiterate: 90% fantasy, for today - but I think this fantasy should maybe inform your thinking around what Bitcoin will become.