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@ AVERAGE_GARY - (x, C)
2025-05-01 18:22:01
"Standardness rules exist for three main reasons. The first is as DoS protection. Your peers on the P2P network are not identified and some transactions are more expensive than others to process. An asymmetry between the cost of sending you an unconfirmed transaction (which is very small) and the cost for you to process it creates a DoS vector. Another reason for standardness rules is to provide upgrade hooks for soft forks. Invalidating a type of transactions in a soft fork that was already non-standard for a while gives more guarantees that a non-upgraded miner won’t include a newly-invalid transaction in a block, making soft forks significantly safer to roll out. Finally, standardness rules have also been used as a way to nudge behaviour toward a less harmful approach, or to mildly deter certain activities. For instance by standardizing OP_RETURN outputs, or discouraging data storage back when blocks were not full."
https://antoinep.com/posts/relay_policy_drama/