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I’m a bit confused about what’s happening on the Bitcoin network right now. We’re at around upgrade 30 (if I’ve understood right), and from what I’ve read there are proposals to allow more things to be transmitted on the chain beyond just BTC transactions.

The idea seems to be adding a system that can filter data submitted to the network, but this could also open the door to spam. It feels linked to what started with Ordinals and BRC-20s, where people began attaching images and tokens to sats.

From what I gather, this new proposal might make it easier for people to submit non-monetary content to Bitcoin, then use filtering tools to sort it out. But if that’s the case, won’t it just clog the chain even more?

I don’t fully understand yet whether this is good or bad for Bitcoin long term. On one hand, it could expand use cases. On the other, it risks undermining the simplicity of Bitcoin as peer-to-peer money.

If anyone here has a clearer view, I’d love to hear it. I’d like to write a blog post on this topic but need to get my head around the details first. Right now, I only know what I’ve picked up from forums and podcasts like What Bitcoin Did.

#Bitcoin #BTC #Ordinals #BRC20 #Crypto #Blockchain

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Discussion

FreeYoda 3mo ago

Well.... Welcome to the technical (and legal, and moral, and ??) side of Bitcoin.

Just what I know (rather limited):

You probably picked up the Op_Return discussion.

The Op_Return is an existing feature that used to be limited to 80 bytes to include a short message (80 bytes of data) to a transaction.

With the v30 release that limit is scaled to 4 Mb.

One of the things that make the discussion more complex is that there are other ways to add data.

Those other ways have plusses and minuses.

One of the arguments is that if the new 4Mb is used, the way data is include is more straight foreward (I think this is not guaranteed btw).

Another thing is what will be allowed to put in that data.

Plain text or pictures etc (and that could be porn etc)

This could have legal implications (if you run a node you store data on your node and thus possible illegal stuf).

If a picture is split in sets of 80 bytes and submitted via multiple transactions any picture (extrapolation is allowed 😇) can be stored on chain.

What is the difference between a program showing you a picture stored in one .jpg file or a program showing you a picture (or whatever) by combining many 80 bytes Op_Return data.

So if we filter we have the what should we filter discussion.

What we think or believe does not mean a judge or legislation will agree....

We should asume this kind of data is already onchain making things even more complicated.

So we have voices that say nodes should be able to select what they store (and if so we can ask: what should that be)..

It becomes a complex system if different nodes run different versions so what is stored or not could become unclear.

My estimate would be that above is less than 5% of what needs to be discussed related to the Op_Return aspects.

And that is just one change...