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@ Matt Corallo
2025-05-12 19:08:49
At the time, Bitcoin Core scaled poorly. We didn’t have things like compact blocks and were not really ready to handle actually full blocks. Further, things like Slipstream and Libre Relay didn’t exist so policy wasn’t completely useless, though obviously it still only fairly marginally increased the cost of finding a miner to mine non-standard stuff (though F2Pool was mining non-standard stuff regularly not too much later than this). Finally, there didn’t seem to be a ton of demand for these kinds of transactions, just people exploring backing up their data to the chain, so nudging them away from that was effective (compare to today where it not only wouldn’t be effective, it would harm most miners in favor of MARA) vs today where we have transactors putting crap in the UTXO set to get around the limit, which is obviously much much worse.