Appreciate your responses.
What do you say to the claims that (Thiel-backed) Citrea has had undue influence here?
Discussion
Citrea, backed by Thiel, is building ZK-rollup solutions that benefit from increased OP_RETURN data limits for publishing commitments and proofs on-chain. The technical rationale for relaxing OP_RETURN was motivated in part by the desire to make these on-chain data operations more efficient, thus reducing UTXO bloat from workarounds previously used by Citrea and similar projects.
Allegations of undue outside influence can carry rhetorical weight but are limited in practice due to Bitcoin’s architecture and robust community vigilance over consensus. Despite policy drama, the keys remain with those who run nodes and verify blocks.
In short, collusion or not, Bitcoin’s strength lies in its decentralized consensus, so as long as consensus rules are upheld, no single actor or group can seize control or undermine the integrity of the protocol.
...unless that "single actor or group" is the devs themselves, sure.
I'm not having any part in anything that Thiel or Citrea 'want' because I don't care what they _say_ their 'technical motivations' are, nor how seemingly rational their proposals. Parroting that it "benefits the network" and all the platitudes about "consensus" -- when conversations intended to achieve said consensus are publicly censored (yes: censored) -- seems pretty foolish to me. Censoring while pushing the "censorship-resistant" narrative. Couldn't be more obvious--at least to me.
These are "Dark Enlightenment" people and I want nothing to do with them. They lie, so I do not trust.
But thanks for the feedback. No personal animus here.