Bitcoin's Unspent Database Clogged by Fake-Address Text Outputs

Bitquery's recent census of Bitcoin transactions has revealed an unexpected issue - 96,231 fake-address text outputs are clogging the unspent database. These outputs persist even after confirmation and account for approximately 3.2 BTC that is effectively unspendable.

The study found that these fake-address text outputs place readable bytes in place of a normal address hash, making them appear spendable to nodes but having no known corresponding private key.

Bitquery's census also showed that OP_RETURN taunt transactions, which add no spendable state, accounted for 13,062 occurrences across 579 blocks. These transactions had an aggregate fee of 0.1014 BTC.