CryptoSlate
Bitquery's September 2 census scanned 965,135 Bitcoin blocks and quantified how two text-embedding channels impose very different node costs. The study counted 13,062 OP_RETURN taunt transactions that add no spendable state, against 96,231 fake-address text outputs that do remain in the unspent transaction output (UTXO) set.
Why it matters
The contrast is the story. OP_RETURN outputs are pruned from UTXO state once a node has indexed them; the bytes stay in block history but stop costing node memory. Fake-address text places readable bytes where an address hash would normally sit, so nodes see an apparently spendable output pointing at a key nobody owns. Bitquery estimates roughly 3.2 BTC is now locked in those ghost outputs across 3,286 transactions, unspendable in practice but persistent in state until spent. The Bitcoin developer guide explicitly recommends OP_RETURN over fake-address construction precisely to avoid this kind of UTXO bloat.
Bitcoin Core 30.0, released in October 2025, raised the default -datacarriersize setting to 100,000 and allowed multiple OP_RETURN outputs under an aggregate limit. Messages longer than the old 80-byte ceiling appeared only a few dozen times per month before v30 and rose into the thousands by February 2026, with the March 21 to 26 taunt campaign (a 62-byte ASCII message naming developer Luke Dashjr) paying just 0.1014 BTC in aggregate fees across 579 blocks.
Market impact
For node operators the read is operational: 96,000 unspendable outputs are a small but persistent tax on every full node's working set, and the gap between block-history data and UTXO-state data is where that cost lands. The broader scan classified 4.4M OP_RETURN outputs as readable text without comparable UTXO burden, so the relay policy shift has not yet forced the worst case. Watch whether future text-on-Bitcoin campaigns keep choosing the cheap path or repeat the March pattern of bloating UTXO state directly.
Frequently asked questions
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What did Bitquery actually count in its September 2 census?
The firm scanned 965,135 Bitcoin blocks and classified four channels where text gets embedded in the chain. It counted 13,062 OP_RETURN taunt transactions and 96,231 fake-address text outputs still sitting in the UTXO set, plus 4.4M OP_RETURN outputs classified as readable text overall.
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Why are fake-address outputs worse for nodes than OP_RETURN?
OP_RETURN outputs are pruned from node state once indexed, so their bytes live in block history but stop costing working memory. Fake-address text places readable bytes where an address hash should sit, so the node sees an apparently spendable output pointing at a key nobody owns, and that ghost output persists in…
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How much Bitcoin is locked in those fake-address outputs?
Bitquery estimated roughly 3.2 BTC across 96,231 outputs in 3,286 transactions. The funds are effectively unspendable because no known private key matches the embedded text, but the outputs still count against node state.
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What did Bitcoin Core 30.0 change about OP_RETURN relay policy?
Released in October 2025, v30 raised the default -datacarriersize setting to 100,000 bytes and allowed multiple OP_RETURN outputs under an aggregate limit for relay and mining. Standardness choices changed; consensus rules for block validity did not.
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Did Bitcoin Core 30.0 cause the rise in large text messages?
Bitquery's data is observational, not causal. Messages longer than the old 80-byte ceiling appeared only a few dozen times per month before v30 and rose into the thousands by February 2026, but easier default propagation is one mechanism, not a proven cause. The March 2026 taunt that named Luke Dashjr used a 62-byte…
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