This is the first update to Bitcion that I’m not jumping on and grabbing right away, because I think the choice of checking transaction types in blocks is not necessarily a good thing… at least while the question is undecided in the community. It does impact the network but in a subtle and political way.
At the very least I wish that Satoshi would at least express his view on what he thinks about putting extra data into transactions beyond pure financial data into transactions, and I think this is only going to start an arms race for those who want to play with scripts and those who are trying to keep scripts “pure”. All that has happened here is to simply lay the gauntlet down to get past the “IsStandard()” check and find transactions which can pass that test but still contain other data.