Wouldn’t it be simpler if Core reversed the Op Return limit increase ?

Of course it's true, laurenmt has done a study on this, including simulations.

For it to be fully effective, adoption must be 90%.

Since you don't argue, muted.

The trees obscure the forest

A summary:

Ways to insert data:

1) OP_RETURN outputs (“nulldata”)

You put the bytes in a non-spendable output (scriptPubKey starting with OP_RETURN).

Advantages: does not widen the UTXO set; easy to detect/filter; highly visible in explorers.

2) In the witness (SegWit/Taproot) — e.g., inscriptions

The content is serialized within an unexecuted conditional (“envelope” OP_FALSE OP_IF ... OP_ENDIF).

Advantages: witness bytes “weigh 1 WU/byte” (≈¼ of a vbyte), so it is much cheaper per byte than non-witness/OP_RETURN.

Disadvantages: pruned nodes may discard old witnesses (you don't rebuild them locally).

3) Data in spendable scriptPubKey (“fake” multisig, etc.)

Like the famous case in the whitepaper (2013): bytes distributed across 947 outputs within the scriptPubKey.

Problem: if those outputs remain unspent, the bytes live in the UTXO set ⇒ unspendable until they are spent. This is the least recommended approach today.

4) Coinbase (miner's transaction input script)

Miners can put text/tags in the coinbase scriptSig (in addition to the mandatory height per BIP34).

Useful for messages or pool identifiers; not a general approach for large files.

5) Commitments via Taproot key tweak

You don't store the blob, you cryptographically commit to it (e.g., to its hash) by “putting” it in the Taproot key tweak.

Advantages: cheap and clean (no bulky data on-chain), revealable whenever you want.

Use: protocols/assets on Bitcoin (Taproot Assets, etc.).

Now come the uncomfortable questions.

Do you think spammers will use op_return if it is four times more expensive than witness? Do you think spammers will act in good faith as Core assumes? Since when do spammers act in good faith?

And here's the key: Core has given up on fighting spam, it doesn't run filters on Witness, so why run any kind of limit on op_return?

OP_RETURN is a general policy change. OP_RETURN is just one more thing, in the same way that Knots comes with permitbaremultisig disabled and Core has it enabled.

Currently, Knots filters more than 98% of transactions, while Core no longer filters anything.

Neither violates the consensus rules; they simply have different policies.

So the final decision rests in the hands of the users, knowing that the filters do work, although their effectiveness depends on the percentage of nodes that run them. The more nodes, the more effective they are, but even with 20% of nodes running the filters, as is currently the case, a percentage of spam transactions are not mined.

That said, not running filters and removing the op_return limit opens up new attack vectors.

Perhaps the biggest problem is the campaign of lies that the entire core environment has orchestrated, and obviously one has to wonder who benefits from this.

Did the filters do any harm? Of course, now they will come up with the excuse of compact blocks and mempool homogenization.

Why is MrHodl wrong - curious pleb, thanks

That pressure exists regardless. The more we relay it independently of them, the more plausible deniability they have that's all.

MARA will put junk in the chain that is relayed by <1% of the network currently so that isn't the factor at play here for the most part.

Delayed block propagation isn't really significant enough for miners to care. MARA did with the sub 1s/vb stuff but that's the world's least lucrative spam, and they seem to keep dipping into it anyway.

What would be the critical mass of Knots nodes, to put pressure on the miner running core v30 not to allow illicit content uploads, as the confirmation might take too long?

i mean new bLoCkChaiNs not coins....

yes that what i thought... but don't you find that at odds with how easy shitcoiners come up with new coins?

i think there is clearly a lack of incentives beside altruism

“”Whatever actually is a Bitcoin? A Bitcoin is not a thing. It is just an arbitrary blob of data used for transactions…””🤦‍♂️

Adjust your paradigm to a level of abstraction that favors utility.

Employing Wittgenstein semantical arguments is nonproductive.

Filters work well when deployed on large enough scale. They don’t fix the problem entirely. The fallacy of the other side’s argument is that we should aim for perfect results with getting rid of the spam (which won’t happen even if we fork the chain with consensus rule change) or we should abandon the fight entirely.

Today’s quiet mempool isn’t a danger—the subsidy still secures the chain—but the new unlimited-blob rule is permanent and will let the subsequent spam wave stuff blocks, driving up disk, RAM, and bandwidth costs until only datacentres can afford to run nodes. Meanwhile fast off-chain payment networks are on track to reach global scale within a couple of years, so real payment traffic—not chain-bloating uploads—will feed the fee market once the subsidy is gone; if we don’t keep block weight in check now, we’ll end up with Ethereum-style centralised validation just as those fees finally arrive.

Inscriptions and ordinals are potentially zero day exploits wrapped in colorful memes.

There won’t be a fork. Knots enforces the same consensus rule set as Core. The only difference is how the two clients handle policy rules, which can’t result in a chain split.

serious question: if it's so easy to fork bitcoin and it's open source why there aren't multiple clients around developed by the main bitcoin brands like blockstream, microstrategy, strike, swan, river, bullbitcoin, etc...???

a lot higher for sure, because the reward will be low.

But hope this will not avoid most legit transactions (too higher fees for low transactions amount).

That's why "spam" should be a concern for everyone.

In fairness, they’re at a loss for what to do once their USAID funding got rugged

You don’t have to sympathize with Putin to disagree with the EU narrative about what’s going on, and what can be done NOW.

Everyone keeps talking about how we need non-bitcoiners, how we need more than just kind1, how we need inter-kind cross operability, etc...

Here is a fantastic example of all that, Try Olas.

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