All the developers need to do is strictly validate Taproot witness sizes, and this loophole will be closed, everything will go back to normal.
A few years ago, while they were designing this specification for Taproot, they said that they did not want to prevent other use cases with Taproot. But in hindsight, it was clearly a mistake not to impose strict validation.
I have sent a message to the bitcoin-dev mailing list with this proposal and I hope to start a huge conversation about it over there.
This is interesting and I thought that the biggest problem is this ordinals stuff creating this congestion, but then I came across this post
I've spoken about this before too:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.57336047The explanation is that lots of people just blindly accept the fee that their chosen wallet or website tells them, and that the vast majority of wallets and websites are absolutely awful at suggesting an appropriate fee. As you say, all it takes is one exchange to kick start the process by dumping a bunch of overpaying transactions in the mempool, and then 90% of wallets and websites out there start matching those exorbitant fees, and we get in to a vicious cycle. If everyone (exchanges included) actually just paid attention to the fee they are paying, then everyone could save 90% on all their fees, all the time.
and I wondered in how far exchanges and miners can actually manipulate fees by creating overly expensive transactions themselves and then hope for people to just accept whatever their wallet calculates as the required fees? It makes sense to me as there have been times where I didn't pay attention myself and accepted whatever had to be paid.
But again, could fee manipulation be a long-term problem despite increasing adoption? Both exchanges and miners would have an incentive to do it if it's possible.