Relaxing output standardness

Following CHIP: Targeted Virtual Machine Limits, output standardness is no longer useful for limiting the worst-case performance of transaction and block validation. (See Rationale: Use of Input Length-Based Densities and Rationale: Selection of Hashing Limit for some specific mentions of relaxing output standardness.)

I plan to propose a CHIP for 2026 to relax output standardness by allowing all outputs that are shorter than the longest currently-standard output type (bare multisig) such that VM implementations no longer need to inspect the contents of the output to determine standardness, just a length check will suffice.

I wrote more about relaxing standardness in 2022, even more about it in the Limits CHIP rationale, and more elsewhere.

I’ll work more on this after November, but just wanted to create a topic to collect any discussion on the general subject.

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There’s probably better ways of constructing Smart Contracts that can avoid this (as Jason’s mentioned at the bottom of this thread), but linking this as it demonstrates some (non-obvious) scenarios where lockscript standardness might land a contract dev in hot-water.

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