According to Samson Mow, someone paid a senior Bitcoin developer to write the year’s most contentious code change request to eliminate OP_RETURN’s datacarrier limit from Bitcoin Core’s default mempool.
Rather than the idea emerging organically from a grassroots discussion among Bitcoin community members, Mow claims that pull request (PR) 32359 was a corporate initiative from the start.
During initial discussions on the Bitcoin-Dev Mailing List and GitHub, Chaincode Labs’ Antoine Poinsot and PR author Peter Todd expressed cultural and technical reasons for removing the “nudge of” OP_RETURN’s datacarrier limitation that had allegedly become “ineffective” at deterring non-financial, on-chain data storage.
Soon, Bitcoin developers chimed in with historical context on spam filters, convinced that the modification request was an authentic request to normalize the placement of non-financial data on Bitcoin blocks across OP_RETURN, witness, and other areas of transactions.
Eventually, however, Todd admitted that his primary motivation for his proposal was corporate. In a StackerNews response, he affirmed, “For the record, this pull-req wasn’t my idea. I was asked to open it by an active Core dev because entities like Citrea are using unprunable outputs instead of OP_Return, due to the size limits.”
In Mow’s view, this meant that someone at Chaincode, like Poinsot, paid off Todd in a sort of “PR laundering.”
Poinsot responded to the accusation, denying that he personally paid Todd while claiming ignorance about other people at Chaincode. “Did Chaincode pay Peter to open this PR? That sounds pretty surprising to me.”
Poinsot then fired back at Mow, calling him a “desperate attention grabber” who mistakenly thought his followers were “that stupid” to believe the accusation.
Read more: Moderators censor Bitcoin devs as OP_RETURN war rages on
A revival of the Bitcoin OP_RETURN war
For context, this year’s disagreement over non-financial data in Bitcoin’s blockchain is a revival of its late-2010 OP_RETURN war. Indeed, nearly 15 years ago, Satoshi Nakamoto was starting to comment on arbitrary data publications into Bitcoin’s blockchain.
Conservatively, Satoshi introduced a restriction on transaction types, reflecting a preference for keeping the blockchain lean and focused on financial transactions. Satoshi suggested that projects requiring large data storage, such as BitDNS/Namecoin, should use a separate blockchain linked into Bitcoin’s proof-of-work rather than embedding all data on its main chain.
Last week, a group of Chaincode and Brink developers tried to lift OP_RETURN’s datacarrier limit from approximately 80 to hundreds of thousands of bytes for Bitcoin Core’s default mempool.
They argued the change was no big deal, an unremarkable “modernization” for mempool filters that acknowledged the ease of storing non-financial data elsewhere on Bitcoin’s ledger.
Defending the 80-byte filter, a group of independent and Knots node operators blamed the rushed, corporately-influenced proposal of pushing Bitcoin down a slippery slope of tedious transaction validation and non-financial data storage.
In their view, it was the first of a “thousand cuts” and an obvious sabotage of Bitcoin’s monetary network by “spammers” seeking to turn it into “just another database.”
Is PR 32359 actually going to happen?
Blockstream engineer and Core contributor Greg Sanders wrote that Core was planning to implement PR 32359 in the next software update.
Updates about the intention of Core maintainers are changing by the hour, and it’s unclear whether the new software version will actually include the OP_RETURN datacarrier modification.
Votes and participation on the GitHub for the PR are locked. Dozens of developers voted for and against the proposal. Bitcoin full nodes running Knots, signaling opposition to the PR, have come online to an all-time high for the year.
GitHub administrators have censored the debate and #FixTheFilters continues to trend on social media as the debate continues.
Many critics are blaming Core for accommodating corporate interests versus focusing on Bitcoin’s development as a non-fiat monetary network.
