Perceiving victory as guaranteed, a powerful group of Bitcoin developers has scheduled a major change to Core software for October that would finalize their victory over conservative dissidents.
If version 30 of Bitcoin’s most popular full node software launches on this schedule, Bitcoin Core’s default mempool will no longer filter OP_RETURN outputs with large amounts of non-financial data.
Developers have been embroiled in disagreements this year over their willingness to easily queue up transactions across nodes with large amounts of data unrelated to the on-chain movement of bitcoin (BTC).
For the vast majority of Bitcoin’s existence, so-called OP_RETURN data carrier limits for Bitcoin Core’s default mempool limited outputs to under 84 bytes of data. This year, progressives led by Antoine Poinsot and Peter Todd decided to spearhead an increase to nearly 4MB.
Flagging that change as irresponsible, antithetical to Bitcoin’s purpose, and overrun with corporate interests, conservatives led by Luke Dashjr and BitcoinMechanic led a resistance movement.
According to the conservative view, Bitcoin node operators should resist data storage unrelated to the on-chain movement of BTC. Unlike cloud storage or a database to host arbitrary data, the Bitcoin ledger should narrowly limit data to BTC movement validation.
Large OP_RETURN data scheduled for October
In a surprise announcement akin to a premature declaration of victory over conservatives, this morning, progressive developer Gloria Zhao announced an October release date for Bitcoin Core version 30. (The latest version of Bitcoin Core is 29.0.)
In an effort to pacify the opposition, progressives will modify the default value from 80 bytes up to nearly 4MB, yet allow node operators to manually modify the -datacarrier and -datacarriersize parameters if they desire.
Of course, they know that most node operators run default settings and will not make this manual, conservative override.
The original proposal by progressive Antoine Poinsot and Peter Todd didn’t even allow users to adjust this default value. Making the setting user configurable is a slight compromise from the progressives.
The most important action is the modification of the default setting, of course.
Read more: Knots ‘warning’ escalates Bitcoin OP_RETURN war
Progressives have obliquely acknowledged that OP_RETURN’s October change isn’t unanimous.
Bitcoin Magazine’s technical editor referred to conservatives as “mobs of unhinged, clueless, and in some cases outright malicious and manipulative people on social media.”
BitcoinMechanic, on the other hand, called the progressive change completely “incoherent.”
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