Bitcoin Core Policy Update Sparks Outrage Among BTC Purists

• A group of Bitcoin Core developers published an op-ed indicating their support for non-financial use cases.
• The article follows an announcement that Bitcoin Core will remove a data cap that restricts non-financial transactions.
• An opposing camp of Bitcoin purists objects to transactions they view as spam.

A recent op-ed by Bitcoin Core contributors has indicated support for non-financial use cases, hinting at contentious changes to how the software handles transaction relaying.

The article prompted an immediate backlash from an opposing camp of Bitcoin purists, who argue that non-financial use cases unnecessarily clog up the network and diverge from Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision.

Non-Financial Data and Bitcoin Core

While alternative clients like Bitcoin Knots exist, the vast majority of Bitcoin nodes today run Bitcoin Core, and updates to the software have far-reaching implications for the network.

In the past, Bitcoin Core updates have enabled innovations like the development of Ordinals inscriptions.

But as Ordinals and other novel use cases have evolved, certain quarters of the Bitcoin community have characterized non-financial transactions as spam and pushed for node operators to reject them.

The OP_RETURN Debate

In recent months, the debate over how Bitcoin deals with Ordinals and other data-intensive use cases has centered on OP_RETURN, a Bitcoin opcode used to append additional data to transactions.

Since 2014, Bitcoin Core has implemented a strict cap on how much data can be added to transactions using  OP_RETURN.

However, in May, Core developers announced that the next version of the client would abandon the current 80-byte limit.

In the recent op-ed, Core developers characterized the change as a shift toward a more permissive relay policy. Node operators don’t have to relay transactions with more OP_RETURN data attached, they stressed, but Bitcoin Core will no longer enforce a limit.

“It is the case that transaction acceptance rules have been used effectively in the past to discourage the development of use cases that used block space inefficiently,” they stated.

However, they argued that continuing to block an “economically viable use” runs counter to Bitcoin’s ethos of censorship resistance.

Bitcoin Purists Push Back

Many Bitcoiners fiercely oppose Bitcoin Core’s move to accommodate novel use cases. They argue that data-heavy transactions cause unnecessary congestion and push fees up for everyday uses.

Responding to the op-ed, one community member wrote :

“it is clear to see that your intention is to turn Bitcoin into a generic crypto—a swiss army knife indiscriminately capable of thousands of non-monetary “use-cases”—the cost of which will be paid by volunteers.”

Meanwhile, Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr accused the authors of “[ignoring] the lack of consent to spam by users/node operators,” and “giving deference to the attackers and the malicious miners who might conspire with them.”

If Dashjr is right, and the wider community views non-financial use cases as spam, the removal of Bitcoin Core’s OP_RETURN cap could push more node operators to his alternative client, Bitcoin Knots.

Bitcoin Knots will keep its current restrictions in place and continue to reject transactions with OP_RETURN data larger than 83 bytes unless manually adjusted by users.