Scan reveals 96,000 fake-address outputs clogging Bitcoin’s unspent database

A scan of the Bitcoin ledger identified about 96,000 unspent outputs tied to “fake” or non-standard addresses, effectively cluttering the UTXO database. These outputs appear to be junk or malformed scripts that cannot correspond to real spendable addresses, so they persist as unspent and contribute to chain-state bloat. While they do not pose an immediate theft or consensus risk, their accumulation increases UTXO set size and raises storage and sync costs for full-node operators. The finding highlights pressure for node-level heuristics, wallet filtering, or protocol-level mitigations to control state bloat and protect network decentralization.