A new survey of Bitcoin’s blockchain has found that more than 96,000 outputs containing text through fake addresses remain in the network’s unspent transaction output set (UTXO), creating a lasting burden for nodes.
Blockchain data company Bitquery published its census on 2 September after examining 965,135 blocks. The research compared four ways text can appear in Bitcoin and found that similar-looking messages can have significantly different effects on the computers that maintain the network.
Bitquery identified 13,062 transactions using `OP_RETURN` to publish taunting messages. Those transactions created no spendable state. By contrast, 96,231 fake-address text outputs still appear as apparently spendable coins in the UTXO set.
The findings include a campaign that ran from 21 to 26 March 2026 and repeated the same two-sentence taunt aimed at Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr. It involved 13,062 transactions sent from 13,062 addresses across 579 blocks, with total fees of 0.1014 BTC.
Bitcoin’s public ledger records the text, timing, inputs and fees associated with the activity. However, the data does not reveal who paid for the transactions, who wrote the message or what the motive was.
Different effects on Bitcoin nodes
Across its wider analysis, Bitquery classified 4,412,782 `OP_RETURN` outputs as readable text. The company said these outputs have a different impact from text embedded in fake addresses because Bitcoin handles the two forms differently once transactions are confirmed.
Nodes do not need to keep an `OP_RETURN` output in the UTXO database used to establish whether coins remain spendable. The data itself is still preserved in Bitcoin’s historical block record.
Bitcoin’s developer guide describes this type of null-data output as preferable to techniques that create outputs appearing to be spendable, because those methods add to the size of the UTXO set.
Fake-address text, however, places readable bytes in the part of an output where an address hash would normally be stored. To a node, the result looks like a coin that could be spent, even though the text does not correspond to any known private key.
Bitquery found 96,231 examples in 3,286 transactions. It estimated that they contain about 3.2 BTC that is effectively unspendable. Unless those outputs are spent, they remain part of the current state held by nodes.
Policy change and growth in larger messages
Bitcoin Core 30.0, released in October 2025, made larger `OP_RETURN` transactions easier to relay under its default policy. Its release notes increased the default `datacarriersize` setting to 100,000 and permitted multiple `OP_RETURN` outputs within an aggregate limit for relay and mining.
The changes affected standardness policy rather than consensus. They did not alter the rules that determine whether a Bitcoin block is valid.
Bitquery reported that messages exceeding the previous 80-byte payload limit appeared only a few dozen times in most months before Bitcoin Core v30. By February 2026, the number had risen into the thousands.
Easier default propagation is one possible explanation for the increase, although the sequence observed by Bitquery does not establish that Bitcoin Core v30 was solely responsible.
The message used in the March campaign was 62 ASCII bytes long, meaning it would already have fitted within the former limit. The campaign therefore demonstrates the low cost of repeatedly placing text in `OP_RETURN` outputs after the policy change.
The company said its analysis was not a complete count of every piece of text embedded in Bitcoin. It did not have coinbase fields for 191,427 historical blocks and did not include witness inscriptions.
Within the four channels it measured, Bitquery concluded that `OP_RETURN` adds data to Bitcoin’s historical record without expanding the UTXO set. Fake-address text, meanwhile, creates a continuing burden in the state that nodes must retain.
Bitcoin is up 5.47% over the past 24 hours and currently ranks first by market capitalisation.
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