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 Thank you. Part of me thinks that that the block subsidy in segwit created an incentive for non-financial data and thereby increases the risk of MEVil. Would you agree with that? 
 By block subsidy I meant witness discount. 
 No, there’s enough value in these things it doesn’t matter if it’s discounted at the fee level or not, people would eventually have done it. The question is only if they do it carefully or not. 
 Could a softfork to 4mb blocks allow the removal of the witness discount? I apologize in advance if this is a dumb idea/question 😏 
 No, this would be a terrible idea. People are going to put data on the chain anyway, the witness discount encourages them to put the data in a place that is much cheaper for the bitcoin network. 
 I don't understand how it is cheaper for the network if my node stores the data either way, whether it's in the witness section or not. Or does a node not actually store the witness? 
 The theory is that the witness data can be pruned after you download and verify it. This would reduce the space needed to store the full list of transactions. 

This is the theory but I’m not sure there is much practical benefit. 

Firstly, many nodes are probably already pruning out all the transactions they don’t care about which reduces storage space immensely. 

Secondly, full nodes need to store that witness data so they can bootstrap new nodes. 

Thirdly, between bandwidth and storage space, nodes are more likely bandwidth constrained. All that jpeg witness data needs to be downloaded and verified by every node. 

Matt, what am I missing? 
 I heard about the theory of pruning the witness data during the 2017 fork wars, but haven't crossed it IRL. The only way of pruning AFAIK is pruning the total chain size by storing only the most recent blocks, but storing those in full. Would really like to know about actually pruning witness data. Unfortunately I'm not code-savvy enough to read the source 🥺 
 Thank you for taking the time to reply. I had a feeling it was a bad idea, but was not sure; thus the compulsion to ask. Appreciate you 🙏