Bitcoin's Ledger Is Getting Stuffed With Fake Addresses

96,000 fake outputs and counting

A new scan from Bitquery found something pretty wild: around 96,000 fake-address outputs are sitting in Bitcoin's unspent transaction database (the UTXO set), and they're not exactly harmless.

These outputs use cheap tricks like repeated OP_RETURN data and fake-looking addresses to get written onto the chain for next to nothing. The problem is, every one of these entries has to be stored and tracked by every full node, forever (or until spent).

Spam or stress test?

People in the comments are already split on what this actually is. Some think it's basically spam clogging up the network for cheap. Others wonder if it's more of a stress test to see how Bitcoin's infrastructure handles the extra weight.

Either way, it's a good reminder that block space isn't free, even when it feels like it. Node operators are the ones quietly footing the bill for all this extra data sitting around.