You’re welcome. Emotions seem to be running high on all sides over what seems to me to be a relatively small and technical change.

The back door is in the Bitcoin consensus rules, not node transaction filters, so changing that is more involved.

You’re right that it would make it a little easier to add spam into OP_RETURN without filters, but this back door is fairly inconsequential compared to the giant cathedral-sized front door: witness data.

And even if 100% of nodes had filters on, if someone really wants to put more data in OP_RETURN, they will go straight to a miner because it is valid in consensus. Here, you can do it right now if you want: https://slipstream.mara.com

The question isn’t whether or not to let spam in Bitcoin, that ship has sailed. A lot of people don’t want to accept it, and I don’t like it either, but this particular node filter doesn’t move the spam needle much in either direction. People are standing in front of a mountain and fighting over a molehill. (And getting pretty nasty about it)

The real question is whether it’s worse to make it slightly easier to put spam in block space that costs them 4x as much as where they normally put it, or let the UTXO set bloat with unspendable transactions that we’ll need to keep track of forever?

Personally, I think bloat is worse but not an existential threat either way.

Run Knots, run core, it’s all good. More nodes is better.