Ferris Bueller's avatar
Ferris Bueller 3 months ago
Witness data is binary signature blobs. Its expensive to abuse, hard to parse, and ignored by most tools. OP_Return is explicitly indexed and human-readable with basic tools. This makes it a low-cost storage layer for junk or worse and can seriously damage bitcoins reputation. I think there is also a serious distinction between a node that decides to propogate this garbage, and a node that is forced to store it while giving a best effort not too. Intent matters

Replies (1)

Appreciate your argument, and that you actually seem to somewhat understand what’s going on here. I agree, intent matters. That’s why courts and regulators have never held infrastructure providers liable for the bits they transmit. Nor should they ever. Nodes do not have image assemblers built in, just like AT&T doesn’t have movie players built into their switches. Regardless of how “accessible” the bits are, infrastructure providers cannot be held liable for transmitting bits they have no visibility into. Just like paper mills aren’t liable for what people write on them. Do you also think we should criminalize ethernet cables?