Opportunities arise from crises. Although it sounds like a self -help to see the glass half full instead of half -empty, in a world in crisis of opportunities, Bitcoin offers us the opportunity for the crisis to do things better and better.
A crisis is a break in the continuum of normality. An outgoing event cuts the usual flow of events and requires being thought to decide how to continue. It is no accident that crisis, criteria and criticism share etymological roots. A crisis demands the formation of a criterion to be able to make the most successful criticism of events.
We have already commented on this idea, stating that Bitcoin is the crisis of the inherited financial system. But within Bitcoin’s history, crises have also been regular, to some that some have even been described as Wars. We have the call Block size war, The debate about Scalability who opted in the bash bifurcation. And, in the style of the ten years that the Trojan War lasted, this year the conflict initiated in 2014 known as the Op_return wars.
The plural is intentional in Wars Because it has been a conflict that has raised more than one occasion. Makes sense, being An essentialist but also ethical conflicta discussion about the nature of that cryptic being that we call Bitcoin, and, even more, about what It must be Bitcoin.
It is inevitable that the debate on Bitcoin’s essence is a constant. Being an open, neutral and no leaders network, there is no central figure that determines once and for all what it is and what should be Bitcoin. Only the rules of consensus and the consensus on the rules offer a guide. We have the supply limit, the limit of the block space, the work test and the greatest accumulated work; All immovable rules unless a hard fork is made. However, Permissum Vidur id omne quod non prohibitur; Everything that is not prohibited is allowed … or not?
Apart from the consensus rules, there is another subset of agreements, known as standard rulesthat each client or implementation of the Bitcoin software (such as Bitcoin Core), apply to decide which transactions consider “standard” and, therefore, retransmit or include in their Mempool. Among these standard rules is the op_return limit.
The 80 -bytes limit for Op_return was established in 2014 in Bitcoin Core to prevent non -monetary transactions from congesting the network and increased the Bitcoin accounting weight, increasing the storage costs of running a bitcoin node. It was a kind of deterrence, in which it was recognized that there were users who considered that Bitcoin, apart from a money network, is also the most robust decentralized database of history, but that, at the same time, limited the amount of data that could be recorded through Bitcoin Core on the network.
Eliminating this limit has been the root of a fierce debate in the Bitcoin community. Or at least in a part, apparently lower, of her. It is curious to note that, years ago, a debate like this would have scared investors and, by caution, would have reduced their positions in BTC. That the price is rebounding above the USD 100K suggests that the majority of current bitcoin holders are probably not aware of the war Ongoing.
This reveals a certain culture of confidence in the maintainers of the Bitcoin software, for not calling it rather culture of indifference to fundamental issues that are not a price, which can be dangerous in the long term for the governance of the network to remain strict. That is why it is valuable that, at least in a part of the community, there is still conflict and ACCOUNTABILITY.
The limit wants to eliminate because human ingenuity has found ways of Bypasear it. It sounds like an insufficient argument, such as saying that it would be legalized to steal because it has not stopped robberies. However, there are developers who weigh that The limit does more damage than benefit.
OP_RETURN transactions are non -spending. This means that, although they can increase the weight of Bitcoin’s accounting book, they do not congest the UTXO SET. The UTXO SET is the set of valid transactions that can be spent on the Bitcoin network. This is stored in each node to validate new transactions, verifying that the valid reference inputs and thus avoid double expense, and optimize verification, since it is not necessary to travel all the accounting to validate a transaction. The latter leads us to the important nuance: A node can “prune” the accounting book, but not the Utxo Set.
The alternatives to op_return, such as the use of the P2TR script, They congest The Utxo Set. This was the reason why Casey Rodarmor, creator of Ordinals, dissuaded to use inscriptions and promoted the use of Runes. But now, the ZK-Rollup Citrea is using the aforementioned script to be able to implement its Clementine bridge.
This is what has revived the battle, Opening a new gap in the community, with a side arguing that the limit should not be eliminated because it promotes spam transactions, that is, not monetary; and other sides arguing that produces more costs than benefits. But, from our perspective, what this debate about Bitcoin teaches is much more important than the debate in itself.
Whether the limit is eliminated, those interested can pay their favorite mining pool to register their non -monetary transaction in accounting, as they did Taproot Wizards and the Pool Luxor when registering the heaviest transaction in history (3.94mb) for an inscription of ordinals, or as it is done through services such as free Relay and Mara Slipstream.
Customers and nodes can establish policies to decide which transactions pass through their Mempool, but once this transaction is added in a block to the chain, it will be part of the accounting forever. You can prune your accounting, but the UTXO SET cannot prune.
Hence, the true heart of this crisis is more political-philosophical than technical. Above all, because Bitcoin’s adversarial nature is ratified. Although in the application for integration to eliminate the op_return limit there are more votes against than in favor, and that the debate is still open, and that the probabilities are low that the main maintainers of Bitcoin Core progress with the elimination in the short term, many node operators have decided to migrate from Bitcoin Core to Bitcoin Knots.
The way in which the integration application has been pushed has generated distrust between the bitcoiners. First because of the way in which developer Peter Todd eliminated the optional limit for customer manual configuration, as well as the complaints of censorship that were eliminating comments in Github. Then, for conflicts of interest, such as Jameson Lopp’s investments in Citrea. But finally for an ontological and ethical matter: What is Bitcoin and what should be Bitcoin.
Many of the people who have migrated to Knots have done it for a matter of principle, even under the risk that Knots is maintained almost exclusively by who is probably the largest militant against non -monetary transactions in Bitcoin, developer Luke Dashjr, while Core has dozens of developers reviewing the code. Beyond the technical, there seems to be a disagreement that Core maintainers agree to give a white letter to those who are said are filling the network with spam. They consider that It should not be Bitcoin, beyond that I can, in effect, be.
There lies the true importance of this debate. It reminds us that Bitcoin is built as a resolution of the problem of Byzantine generals, where distrust about the true intentions of the rest of the actors is a premise. Therefore, these crises reaffirm the importance of maintaining suspicion and guard guard, because we do not know at what time the developers can be bought to capture Bitcoin, even more so in a context of bitcoinization of the State.
But above all, this debate is good for Bitcoin because it shows us that, given crises and disputes, the best possible response is to decentralize more. Bitcoin Core’s hegemony as the only relevant client for so many years has become a unique failure point that at this point should not be admitted. Again, before a crisis, our criteria with a critical eye increases, and, as usually happens, The final solution found is “let us decentralize more.”
The decision made will not change the essence of what Bitcoin isthat is, the rules of consensus. Being a standard rule, each implementation or bitcoin customer can decide whether to overcome it or not. As well as the Bitcoin Knots implementation will apply all possible standards to reject this type of transactions, another developer can create a new client that, on the contrary, applies all facilities to promote the use of bitcoin as a JPEG database. In the end, the market will decide what it really values about Bitcoin, as it has done throughout its history.
