Fake-Address Outputs Clog Bitcoin's Unspent Database

A recent scan of the Bitcoin blockchain has revealed thousands of fake-address outputs clogging up its unspent database, according to data from Blockchain data company Bitquery.

The study scanned 965,135 blocks and found that these fake addresses are being used in transactions that add no new spendable state to the network. In fact, only 96,231 out of 13,062 OP_RETURN taunt transactions were deemed useless.

One notable example is a campaign targeting Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr, which took place between March 21-26, 2026, and involved 579 blocks with a total fee payment of 0.1014 BTC. The text outputs in question are not spendable and hold about 3.2 BTC that cannot be used.

The study highlights the issue of nodes retaining unnecessary data, which can burden the UTXO set. While OP_RETURN outputs do not require retention, fake-address texts place readable bytes where an address hash would normally go, making them seem spendable to nodes.