Clearing Up ScriptPubKey and Standard Transactions Confusion

I've been really puzzled about how ScriptPubKey and standard transactions connect. They sound similar on the surface, but I'm not sure how they fit together.

ScriptPubKey is basically a set of rules for how Bitcoin can be spent, right? And standard transactions meet all the necessary criteria for validity? That's my take.

Yeah, exactly. ScriptPubKey is just a field that contains raw bytes of the script. But when it’s about ‘IsStandard()’, that’s a function checking if that script can be considered standard or not.

Non-standard transactions are just those that fall outside Bitcoin’s protocol rules. If something isn’t standard, it should generally be rejected by nodes.

But like, non-standard can still be valid, yeah? I mean, there are cases where miners have still accepted them.

For sure. The definition of non-standard is pretty flexible. If it's too big or doesn't follow certain rules, it's labeled as non-standard. But it doesn’t mean it’s invalid.

More like guidelines, I guess. I remember transactions being flagged if they exceed 100 vKB or 400,000 weight units.

So, you're saying it’s all about how the majority of nodes perceive a transaction? That's interesting.

Exactly! Some things like uncompressed public keys are valid but still get hit with the non-standard label. It's all about efficiency in block space.

I see. So the ScriptPubKey acts like a little programming script, pushing and popping values from a stack, depending on the transaction type.

So, about non-standard ones, is it a community-wide thing not to include them in blocks? I read somewhere that these get sent directly to miners.

You can send directly to miners if you want, but normally, transactions go to the mempool first. Each node has its own mempool to filter valid transactions.

It’s pretty wild how all this works. I’m still trying to wrap my head around who decides what goes where!