A free public service · watch Bitcoin decide.
What is every node being made to carry?
The sender pays once. Every validating node downloads and checks the block. Archival nodes keep it. See what crossed Bitcoin Core's former 83-byte default, block by block.
The fee goes once. The cost fans out.
Inside the blocks
Reading the last few thousand blocks from the node...
But the data would go somewhere anyway
Before OP_RETURN, people disguised data as public keys and bare multisig outputs. Those fake coins could burden the UTXO set. Taproot witness envelopes later opened another path with a four-to-one weight discount.
OP_RETURN created a provably unspendable lane. It keeps arbitrary data out of the UTXO set and makes the bytes explicit. Bitcoin Core's former 83-byte standard-policy cap was part of that compromise.
Where bytes land changes their cost. Fake keys burden the UTXO set. Witness receives a weight discount. OP_RETURN avoids the UTXO set while making arbitrary data explicit. Raising the standard-policy ceiling changes price and permission.
The choice is where data lands, what it costs, and who carries the result.