96,000 Fake-Address Texts Are Clogging Bitcoin’s UTXO

The big scan and what it found

Someone went on a data-sticking spree and left a lot of readable text inside Bitcoin’s ledger — and a blockchain analytics firm scanned the mess. The sweep covered 965,135 blocks and found a few different ways people are stuffing text into transactions. The headline numbers: about 4,412,782 OP_RETURN outputs that contain human-readable text, 13,062 OP_RETURN “taunt” transactions that didn’t create spendable coins, and a startling 96,231 outputs that used fake-address formatting and ended up in the UTXO set.

One notable campaign from March 21–26, 2026 repeatedly named a Bitcoin Core developer in a two-sentence jab. That stunt alone showed up as 13,062 separate transactions coming from 13,062 different sending addresses across 579 blocks, costing the network roughly 0.1014 BTC in total fees. The chain faithfully records the words, timestamps, inputs and fees — but it doesn’t tell you who paid for it or why.

Why this matters to nodes (short version: UTXO bloat)

Not all ways of embedding text are equal. OP_RETURN is the polite way to say “I’m just writing data here” — the data is part of block history but nodes don’t have to keep it in the UTXO database that tracks spendable coins. Fake-address text, however, is sneaky: it puts readable bytes where an address hash normally goes, so a node treats the output as if it could be spent. Except there’s no private key for that made-up address, so those coins are effectively unspendable.

In the scan, those fake-address outputs showed up in 3,286 transactions and are estimated to lock up about 3.2 BTC in practice. Because they look like normal outputs, they sit in the UTXO set and increase node state until someone somehow spends them (unlikely) or protocol rules change. That’s the practical difference: OP_RETURN expands the immutable block history without forcing every node to swallow permanent UTXO growth, while fake-address text directly fattens the current node state.

Software changes have nudged behavior, too. Bitcoin Core 30.0 (released October 2025) raised the default datacarriersize to 100,000 and allowed multiple OP_RETURN outputs up to a total aggregate limit for relay and mining. Those are relay/standardness settings, not consensus rule changes — so miners and nodes can still choose what to relay — but the easier default propagation made larger or more frequent OP_RETURN messages more likely to spread through the network.

Before v30, there was an 80-byte practical ceiling for many OP_RETURN messages; after the policy changes the number of messages longer than 80 bytes rose noticeably, into the thousands by early 2026. That said, the March taunt was only 62 ASCII bytes, so it didn’t need the higher limits — it mostly illustrates how cheap and repeatable simple OP_RETURN postings became.

One caveat: the dataset isn’t a perfect census of every possible insertion. The scan didn’t include coinbase fields for 191,427 historical blocks and it didn’t count witness inscriptions, so the results compare the state effects of four measured channels rather than cataloging every piece of human-readable text ever embedded in Bitcoin.

Bottom line: if you like permanent blockchain sticky notes, OP_RETURN is the space-saving option. If you prefer to clutter every node’s living room with imaginary-looking coins, fake-address text does the job — and has already left roughly 96,000 such footprints in the UTXO set.