On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, 12:13 William Casarin via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

Hello Mike,

Mike Brooks via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
writes:

> Motivation
>
> Giving scripts the ability to refer to data on the blockchain will reduce
> transaction sizes because key material does not have to be repeated in
> every Script. Users of the network are rewarded with smaller transaction
> sizes, and miners are able to fit more transactions into new blocks.
> Pointers are a common feature and it felt like this was missing from
> Bitcoin Script.

This would incentivize address re-use which would be bad for
fungibility. It appears you're trying to optimize a use case which is
already discouraged :(

Furthermore, right now block validation does not require access to the whole historical chain (only to the set of unspent outputs), so a change like this would massively increase storage requirements for validation.

Cheers,

-- 
Pieter