As a way to troll conservatives in an ongoing debate about the data storage limit of Bitcoin script operation code, OP_RETURN, a few progressives are posting text messages as on-chain graffiti.
The latest example is “your mom.”`
Naturally, someone quickly followed up with “your dad.”
Many other messages attempted to belittle the importance of the datacarrier change. “You all just need to go touch grass and chill,” inscribed one user, while another laughed, “Filters don’t work, so this Tx now lives forever.”
“Anyone telling you that you can filter out arbitrary data at the mempool policy level is either malicious or misinformed,” wrote another. They continued spray painting graffiti like “Lyn Alden is hot.”
Bitcoin’s OP_RETURN war
The central disagreement between the two sides of Bitcoin’s OP_RETURN war is the amount of data that Bitcoin Core, the world’s most popular queue of pending transactions propagated across tens of thousands of full nodes, allows in its mempool.
Since 2016, Bitcoin Core’s OP_RETURN datacarrier limit has been 83 bytes. However, a new proposal by senior developers at Chaincode and Brink aims to lift that cap to hundreds of thousands.
These developers claim that plentiful storage options exist elsewhere within Bitcoin blocks. As a result, they view the OP_RETURN increase as an inconsequential modernization of software standards to reflect the ease of storage elsewhere on the protocol’s ledger.
The conservative defense, led by a rapidly growing cohort of Knots full node operators, argues that easing OP_RETURN is a slippery slope toward arbitrary, non-financial use of Bitcoin’s blockchain.
The term “slippery slope” is a common rhetorical tactic that tries to persuade the listener that accepting a proposal inevitably cascades into undesirable outcomes.
OP_RETURN spam as blockchain graffiti
In the meantime, blockchain graffiti has become a lighthearted tactic of the progressives. In-keeping with their rhetorical tactic of meiosis — understatedly characterizing something as mundane in order to persuade the listener to accept the premise as no big deal — users in favor of lifting the limit are simply spamming OP_RETURN data with arbitrary text messages.
They hope to illustrate the futility of attempting to filter out all spam.
Although the text messages are less than 83 bytes in size, they’re clearly unrelated to the transactional movement of BTC. In other words, they poke fun at the data limit as though it’s not effective.
Read more: Bitcoin nodes protesting OP_RETURN change hit all-time high
Like any good debate, both sides of the Bitcoin OP_RETURN war are convinced by their own rhetoric yet are unable to use it to persuade the other side.
Both rhetorical devices — slippery slope and meiosis — are fallacious as standalone arguments. Nevertheless, authentic debaters can utilize these devices to support an otherwise compelling argument.
Unsurprisingly, camps on both sides of the debate are convinced. These rhetorical tactics have convinced humans for millennia — and Bitcoin users aren’t immune to the power of well-practiced persuasion.
