by Coinstrooper Crypto Articles
Quick Take
  • The draft, known as “The Cat,” would mark millions of dust-sized outputs containing NFT data as permanently unspendable through a consensus-level soft fork.
  • The proposal targets what its author, Claire Ostrom, describes as an unprecedented explosion in Bitcoin’s UTXO set.
  • Between 2009 and early 2023, the UTXO database grew gradually to roughly 80-90 million entries.
  • Within just one year, it doubled to over 160 million entries, with analyses suggesting nearly half of all UTXOs now contain less than 1,000 satoshis.

What Happened

A controversial Bitcoin development proposal to permanently eliminate Ordinals inscriptions and Bitcoin Stamps has sparked fierce debate within the developer community.

The draft, known as “The Cat,” would mark millions of dust-sized outputs containing NFT data as permanently unspendable through a consensus-level soft fork.

The proposal targets what its author, Claire Ostrom, describes as an unprecedented explosion in Bitcoin’s UTXO set.

Market Context

He warned the proposal would likely trigger a flood of evasion transactions while failing to stop NFT trading, since indexers operate independently of consensus rules.

“Less spam is the objective here. I’m not concerned with the price of spam, only the quantity,” Nona stated.

Why It Matters

Within just one year, it doubled to over 160 million entries, with analyses suggesting nearly half of all UTXOs now contain less than 1,000 satoshis.

The legendary developer also criticized the proposal’s length and technical complexity, suggesting it should have been floated as a simple question about discouraging NFTs rather than dense technical documentation.

Developer Nona YoBidnes argued the proposal would send a strong signal to discourage future spam activity.

Details

Between 2009 and early 2023, the UTXO database grew gradually to roughly 80-90 million entries.

The Cat would identify these outputs using external indexers like Ord and Stamps, then render them permanently unspendable while allowing nodes to prune them from the UTXO set entirely.

Maxwell Calls Proposal “Outright Theft”

Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell delivered harsh criticism, calling the proposal a “total non-starter” that would constitute theft.

“The proposal would intentionally and knowingly confiscate millions of dollars in funds,” Maxwell wrote in response to the Bitcoin development mailing list.

Maxwell disputed claims that spam filters are ineffective, arguing that the current setup already blocks most pointless data storage, except for uses that are more valuable because of Bitcoin’s limitations.

“NFTs are just an imaginary parallel world that don’t depend on the network to validate their activity,” Maxwell explained.

He pointed to the potential misuse of language models, leading to unnecessarily complex proposals that waste participants’ time.

Supporters See Essential UTXO Cleanup

Bitcoin Mechanic, a prominent anti-spam advocate, offered cautious support despite acknowledging philosophical concerns about UTXO deletion.

“I don’t consider it unreasonable for Bitcoin users to do this if they see fit as the UTXO set is something that they must contribute resources to maintaining in perpetuity,” he wrote.

The proposal’s supporters emphasize that between 40-50% of the UTXO set consists of spam outputs with dust amounts.

Removing these would provide substantial disk space savings, particularly for maximally pruned nodes.

However, supporters acknowledge the unprecedented nature of consensus-level UTXO deletion.

Bitcoin Mechanic noted that while spam filters can be easily fixed if misconfigured, mistaken UTXO deletion would be catastrophic.

The proposal addresses this by imposing extensive verification requirements and encouraging the community to independently validate snapshots of the targeted outputs.