To understand how spam works in the #bitcoin blockchain, let's start with a simple analogy. Imagine a huge public bulletin board where anyone can post messages. Once a message is posted, it can't be removed or altered. That's essentially what the Bitcoin blockchain is, but instead of physical messages, it stores digital data.
Let's dive into the one of the different ways spam can be added to the blockchain and the problems they can cause.
Pay to Witness Public Key Hash (P2WPKH) & Pay to Taproot (P2TR) & addresses (with the help of Segwit upgrade witness discount)
P2TR and P2WPKH are newer address formats that take advantage of SegWit (Segregated Witness) to reduce transaction sizes and fees. However, spammers are abusing the witness discount feature. It's like a store offering a discount on shipping large items, but someone exploits it to ship tons of useless junk for cheap.
SegWit is one of the #bitcoin upgrades which was first introduced in December 2015. It was introduced with the intention to scale #bitcoin but spammers decided to misuse this upgrade to scam the people
The witness discount gives a ~75% discount on fees for the witness data portion of transactions using these address types. Spammers stuff arbitrary data into the witness to get cheaper spam. Imagine a mail service that charges $1 per ounce, but only 25¢ for each ounce of the envelope. Spammers would send heavy junk mail in huge envelopes to save money.
For example, a spammer can create a P2WPKH transaction with a 1 KB witness containing random garbage data. Instead of paying full fees for 1 KB, they only pay for ~250 bytes due to the discount. It's like sending a 1-pound box of rocks but only paying postage for 1/4 pound because the box itself is discounted. This allows spammers to bloat the blockchain and mempool with junk data at a fraction of the cost compared to regular transactions. It's an exploit of a legitimate feature, like someone abusing a "buy one get one free" sale to hoard items they don't need.
Spammers are also using P2TR addresses which have a same discount formula and can be abused similarly by stuffing the witness with junk to reduce fees. It's like finding another shipping loophole to exploit, such as a discount for certain box sizes that can be filled with useless filler.
These spam attacks not only bloat blockchain size, but can clog up nodes and mempools, degrading network performance for legitimate users. Imagine a post office overwhelmed by a flood of junk mail, delaying normal letters and packages. While the witness discount is well-intentioned to make SegWit transactions cheaper, spammers found a way to game the system and make their attacks more cost-effective. It's like a store's generous return policy being abused by people who wear and return clothes repeatedly to save money.
Almost all the inscriptions (aka one type of scam) use these 2 addresses to bloat the bitcoin blockchain and UTXO set. Inscriptions aren’t directly stored in the UTXO’s set but they leave the dust behind which bloats the UTXO set.
Just look at the growth of UTXO set (with P2TR & P2WPKH addresses). As you can see in this chart, how Inscription is becoming one of the major attack vectors for #bitcoin (in the long run) It's already severely affecting low cost nodes by bloating UTXO set.
Ordinals don’t exist on bitcoin blockchain it’s just a dumb way to count individual Satoshi which has been inscribed into bitcoin blockchain by inscriptions. Some centralized systems count this rare Satoshi in the name of Ordinals which doesn’t exist in the first place.
If you really want to disincentivize this behavior and reduce inscriptions on #bitcoin blockchain , then I would strongly recommend running Knots instead of original #bitcoin core.
If you are miner then point your hash to OCEAN (npub1qtv…7dze) since they always mine almost spam free block and they are the only mining pool who cares about health of the #bitcoin network.
Please like and retweet this post if you find it informative. I will write next post on Runes scam.