Nostr Web Client

Here's some history of Bitcoin Policy changes that were controversial at the time:

Basics: Policy is not Consensus. Satoshi's first client did not relay all transactions that were valid according to consensus. This is necessary so an attacker cannot just flood the network with zero fee (consensus valid) transactions to himself at no cost to him but high cost in bandwidth and CPU to all nodes. Still, even the the early policy filters led some to shout "censorship" when trying out things that were consensus-valid.

2013 the Dust Limit was introduced. Transactions sending 1sat to somebody were not relayed anymore. While this was a reaction to "Satoshi Dice" which permanently spammed the UTXO set with "notification transactions", it also forced other projects like "Colored Coins" back to the drawing board.

2014 OP_RETURN Data Carrier Size Limits were introduced. Before, OP_RETURN accidentally allowed spending any funds on chain which was fixed in 2010 by Satoshi, establishing the OP_RETURN as we know it today. It was limited to 40B (8175c79) and then 80B (a930658) via Policy.

2016 Replace-by-Fee (RBF) was introduced. Before that and especially in the early days, users assumed transactions to be final when they showed up in their mempool aka "wallet". "first-seen-safe" was a thing and shaking that up was perceived as an attack on Bitcoin by many. In 2016, RBF wasn't even activated for all transactions. It was an opt-in feature but still, emotions ran high.

2017 the concept of "Priority Transactions" was removed. Up until then, transactions with no fee at all were relayed and actually mined if they were "priority transactions" meaning for example to spend from old enough UTXOs.

2022 Full-RBF was introduced, enabling any unconfirmed transaction to be replaced. This somewhat revived the FUD from 2016.

2025 OP_RETURN is scheduled to be opened up to 100kB which sits at the core of the recent "Knots vs. Core" drama.

Jerome Powell 21iQ 40TPW 3mo ago

If not for OP_RETURN limits, we would have Ethereum built on top of Bitcoin. Do you want to go back to $50+ transaction fees, so some retards can put monkey jpegs on it. Then we can have the blocksize wars again? #Enshitcoinification

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Discussion

Leo Wandersleb 3mo ago

Much to unpack there.

OP_RETURN is deliberately the most stupid of all op-codes. It does nothing but with lots of data. Nodes do not enforce whatever you want to do on top of OP_RETURN, so no, it doesn't turn Bitcoin into Ethereum.

$50+ transaction fees will be required for Bitcoin's success at some point but the monkey picture spammers moved on. They don't have that deep pockets to sustain this attack. They started with pictures on Bitcoin but quickly realized that it has to be some launch date events to actually drive fees in a disruptive way. That made nobody rich and the few stories where it did - are probably just money laundering, so the attackers can't bet on gullible people falling for this indefinitely. They would need other deep pockets for a sustained attack.

Increasing the blocksize is not a fix ever. We need to improve layers on top of the base chain if we want more people to have actual self-custody. With covenants enforced by miners we could scale Bitcoin by x100 without needing 100MB blocks and therefore with improved privacy.