You ever watch a mule try to solve a math problem? Of course not. No one expects that from a mule. You just hitch it up, point it in the right direction, and let it pull until it drops. That’s you. That’s what you are.
Not a miner. A mule. A loud, blinking, overclocked beast of burden.
Just a pleb with something to say. You wouldn't know me.
Thank you for the compliment.
It's totally personal.
They think the purpose of your mempool is to anticipate miner behavior.
Bitcoin Core 0.9 Release Notes (19 March 2014)
"On OP_RETURN: There was been some confusion and misunderstanding in the community, regarding the OP_RETURN feature in 0.9 and data in the blockchain. This change is not an endorsement of storing data in the blockchain. The OP_RETURN change creates a provably-prunable output, to avoid data storage schemes – some of which were already deployed – that were storing arbitrary data such as images as forever-unspendable TX outputs, bloating bitcoin’s UTXO database.
Storing arbitrary data in the blockchain is still a bad idea; it is less costly and far more efficient to store non-currency data elsewhere."
Oh, how the great have fallen.
Ah, yes—Greg Maxwell, that old conjurer of technical apologetics, stepping out of the shadows like a bureaucrat defending a landfill expansion by citing “efficiency gains.” His post reads like a man explaining why the Department of Motor Vehicles is actually a hotbed of innovation, if only we peons could grasp the nuance.
Let’s unroll this mat of sophistry and stomp the fleas out of it.
“There isn’t anything unusual or bad going on with Bitcoin Core.”
This is the bureaucrat’s lullaby. It’s the same tune sung by every technocrat managing decline. Nothing to see here, folks. Just a totally normal scenario where the most influential Bitcoin client, maintained by an incestuous circle of devs who fancy themselves neutral librarians, is quietly redefining what Bitcoin is via policy code that shouldn’t exist. If Core isn’t doing anything unusual, Greg, then why are you burning tens of hours writing Reddit apologetics like a state-sponsored press secretary fending off citizen journalists?
"It’s mostly a nothing burger..."
That “nothing burger” is dripping grease onto every Raspberry Pi node from here to Patagonia. If it’s nothing, why defend it with a novella? You only see this kind of frothy dismissal when something is definitely something. People don’t write 1,000 words about "nothing" unless their position has already sprung a leak and they’re bailing water with a colander.
“Back in 2014…”
Ah, the Historical Context Gambit. Greg fires up the time machine to justify today’s madness by revisiting ancient block sizes, as if the existence of UTXO bloat in 2014 somehow validates neutering the protocol in 2025. Let’s be clear: OP_RETURN was a concession. A bandage. Not a charter for future feature creep. It was a wartime measure to cordon off the lunatics stuffing wedding vows and ASCII porn into multisig outputs. That’s it. It was a trash can, not an invitation to turn the node software into a public utilities board for sidechain companies who didn’t budget for bandwidth.
“The world has changed a lot since 2014…”
Yes, it has. Fees are higher. The mempool is clogged like a California public toilet. Miners have grown fatter and more rent-seeking. And somehow the solution is to loosen the reins further? This is like discovering your roof is leaking and removing more shingles to improve “ventilation.”
“Some users have said they would use OP_RETURN if not for the limit…”
And this is where the grift shows its face. A few unnamed “users”, likely wearing lanyards in Nashville or sipping LaCroix in Austin, want to dump their backend operations onto the base layer, and we’re supposed to oblige out of sympathy for their innovative scaling vision? They aren’t building with Bitcoin. They’re strip-mining it. They want the credibility of the timechain without the costs. The limit stands in the way, so they cry “oppression.”
“It harms small miners…”
Let’s talk about that Trojan horse of a talking point. If you care so deeply about decentralization, you’d advocate for stronger filtering not weaker. You’d demand ossification, not upstream policy churn disguised as "tweaks." But instead, the cry is always the same: “We need to update Bitcoin... for the little guy!” No. What you need is a brick wall. A protocol that shrugs at your heartfelt use-case and keeps marching. Bitcoin should not care about your cleverness. That is its virtue. That is its entire appeal.
“It’s just a proposal, nothing has been merged…”
And there it is. The gaslight. A classic bit of bureaucratic hand-waving. “We’ve merely discussed it,” they say—while PRs fly, policies shift, and the code tiptoes ever closer to consensus-change disguised as relay policy. You don’t need a merge to shape the culture. You just need enough devs saying “It’s not a big deal” until one day you wake up, and Bitcoin is a middleware substrate for VC startups who thought Ethereum was too gauche.
“The only concerning thing is the misinformation campaign…”
Yes, how dare the rabble raise concerns? How dare plebs ask why the client they’re running is making decisions about what should and shouldn’t relay through their node? The real misinformation campaign is the one that claims Bitcoin Core is a neutral steward. It isn’t. It’s a software project run by humans, with all the biases, ambitions, and unspoken alliances that come with that. And when those humans start parroting the same rhetorical framework used to sell us “censorship-resistance” while actively dismantling the cultural barriers that guard it, we have every right to scream from the rooftops.
The Truth Buried Beneath the Rhetoric:
This is not about spam. Not about hashes. Not about faster block relay or the plight of some obscure payment channel protocol. It is about power. It is about changing the social contract by subverting the codebase. It is about soft-forking the culture by hiding behind technicalities and pretending nothing is happening.
Greg wants you to believe you’re imagining the smoke. But we smell the fire, old friend.
And we’re not going away.
Hot off the presses. REWILD THE HASH!
naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzql5v5emqshp3c93rdzh309kmetxwsv69vtmx5eg59thypxm2w45lqqn5642jg3z4yt25fpzj65z0fax9xt2jg4t5jnzy942ys3fdfpq4xjpdwd6rzmr9xsdpvslr
People trying to ‘upgrade’ Bitcoin are like meth heads tearing apart a microwave to build a time machine. Wires everywhere, teeth nowhere, and not a soul asking if the damn thing was working fine to begin with.
nostr:nprofile1qqs0w2xeumnsfq6cuuynpaw2vjcfwacdnzwvmp59flnp3mdfez3czpspremhxue69uhkummnw3ez6ur4vgh8wetvd3hhyer9wghxuet59uq3samnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3wd3hhqupwwdhkx6tpdshslw6x5e is the president of the Bitcoin HOA.
#Bitcoin
OP_RETURN and the Cult of Cleverness: Or, How Bitcoin Core Learned to Love the Smell of Its Own Farts
There was a time when Bitcoin smelled like ozone and rebellion. When men wore hoodies because they meant it. When software didn’t come with a mission statement or a DAO-approved pronoun guide. When the only thing a Bitcoin dev feared was being wrong, not being unpopular.
That time is dead.
It died somewhere between the fifth Twitter thread explaining why putting JPEGs on the base layer was “valid use,” and the fiftieth PR that added complexity to the engine in order to simplify the cupholders. Now we’re here, ankle-deep in a pool of our own mediocrity, arguing over whether we should triple the OP_RETURN limit so a VC-backed sidechain company can offload its plumbing costs onto your Raspberry Pi.
Welcome to the future. It’s paved in GitHub comments and smells like a WeWork bathroom.
Let’s speak plainly. This whole drama is not about OP_RETURN. It’s about power. Not electrical power. Not hash power. Soft power. The power to redefine what Bitcoin is for, one pull request at a time. It is the power to turn the protocol from a blunt, uncompromising monetary weapon into a polite corporate middleware bus for protocol startups that couldn’t raise a Series B without a little help from their friends in Core.
Jameson Lopp wants to increase the OP_RETURN limit. Why? Because his company, Citrea, needs to squeeze a few more bytes into every transaction. It's not a crime. It’s not even dishonest. It's just pathetically on the nose. They don’t want to pay miners directly. They want the mempool to be their free emergency broadcast system. They want to lean on the public infrastructure without sending flowers or even a thank-you note.
And what does Core say?
They say yes.
Because of “technical merit.”
Because it’s “more efficient.”
Because the devs have long since stopped being guardians of the protocol and started being unpaid product managers for whoever can string enough buzzwords together in a conference talk.
You can see it in their eyes. You can hear it in their interviews. The Core devs aren’t building Bitcoin anymore. They’re managing Bitcoin. They’re curating it. Polishing it. Nerfing it for mass adoption. Like a bunch of Brooklyn baristas trying to make espresso kid-friendly. Bitcoin used to be an espresso shot poured directly into the mouth of the Federal Reserve. Now it’s a lukewarm latte with oat milk and consensus-breaking sprinkles.
The worst part? The refusal to acknowledge that this is not about UTXO bloat. It's not about cleaner mempools. It’s about upstreaming corporate convenience into the base layer under the halo of neutrality. It’s about giving polite names to ugly compromises. “Policy adjustment.” “Ergonomic improvement.” “Relay optimization.” They speak in this weird dialect of bureaucratic techspeak that means nothing and does less.
Meanwhile, the only thing that actually matters gets lost: ossification.
The holy grail of this protocol is ossification. Not stagnation. Not laziness. Not gridlock. Just stability. The longer Bitcoin can go without consensus changes, the more credible it becomes. The more unchangeable it becomes. Like gravity. Like rust. It doesn’t matter how good your argument is. The system won’t budge. That’s the point. The value of Bitcoin isn’t in how clever the devs are. It’s in how irrelevant they become.
But ossification isn't something you declare. You sneak up on it. You approach it sideways, like a wild animal. You do less and less until eventually you’re doing nothing at all, and nobody even remembers how to change the code anymore. That is the goal. To make the protocol so boring, so petrified, that no one can move it. Not Lopp. Not Luke. Not even Larry from Legal.
To get there, we need something devs hate: client balkanization.
That means splitting the client into pieces. Break the codebase. Separate the consensus engine from the policy fluff. Let people run different implementations. Let the free market decide what filters they want, what mempool rules they tolerate, what behavior they’re willing to relay. You want a node that bans inscriptions? Run it. You want a client that auto-forwards every transaction with a JPEG of your left toe? Go for it. Just don’t make it my problem.
Right now, Bitcoin Core is a monoculture. It’s the cathedral and the altar and the pamphlet all rolled into one. That’s not healthy. That’s a single point of failure. That’s a priesthood.
And no, Bitcoin isn’t a religion. It’s worse. It’s a culture. Religion has rituals. Culture has habits. And habits are harder to break. Especially when your dev team gets drunk on the idea that their opinions are features.
If you want to fix this mess, you need to kill the idea that Bitcoin Core is the final word. Strip it down. Remove every line of non-consensus code. Make it boring. Make it dumb. Let the client rot in peace, and let a thousand weird little nodes bloom.
Let the spammers spam themselves into oblivion. Let the free-riders find someone else to subsidize their infrastructure. Let every operator set their own damn filters.
You’ll know ossification is working when the devs start getting bored. When they stop showing up. When there are no more debates. When the politics dry up. When Jameson Lopp finally logs off.
Until then, every line of code you don’t remove is a future argument you’ll be forced to have with someone who thinks “data availability” is more important than keeping the protocol boring.
Bitcoin does not need to be exciting. It needs to be a brick. A self-righteous, opinionated, uncompromising, utterly stubborn monetary brick.
Keep your hands off it.
And take your startup with you.