Thread

Read the thread again, and understand what "never store it" means. You cannot validate a transaction without the data, you must have it locally. To have it locally it must be stored somewhere locally.

Thank you both for going in depth in the discussion and taking the time to do so. I am learning and that was in some part the goal of the post. This is how i currently have it mapped in my head... The mempool needs all the data locally to validate the transaction. Which is a cache. That is temporary. That makes good sense. Once the mempool is validated and the transaction can be stored on the harddrive you can prune the data for longterm storage (remove the OP_RETURN data).