Antoine explained this well at the bitcoin++ mempool edition. It was prompted by a shitcoin company about to launch something that would have harmed the network since they didn’t consult with any core devs. There should be a video up somewhere where he explains this.
Discussion
I don't understand why Citrea cannot do something like Alpen Labs is doing with Strata, where they're able to keep all required "arbitrary" data under 80 bytes.
https://docs.alpenlabs.io/how-alpen-works/bitcoin-bridge
Would we not have to have this debate were it not for Citrea's technical choices?
It might have not come up now, but it seemed inevitable. It’s such a stupid timeline and we really should be talking about covenants instead. Much more interesting debate with actually useful outcomes.
I agree that all this time and effort would be much better devoted to covenants.
Still, this debate has been going on for a while and for whatever reason there seems to be no clarity whatsoever from both sides.
I still have to hear what Knots proponents think of arbitrary data that cannot be marked as unspendable outputs