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Knots ‘warning’ escalates Bitcoin OP_RETURN struggle

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The gloves are off on this 12 months’s revival of Bitcoin’s 2010 OP_RETURN struggle.

Weeks right into a heated deadlock, the chief of the progressive motion searching for to ease knowledge storage limits on Bitcoin Core mempools has distributed with mental arguments, and underhanded rhetoric masquerading as a safety warning has gone viral.

Antoine Poinsot of Chaincode Labs, the originator of pull request (PR) 32359 to extend OP_RETURN’s datacarrier restrict from 83 to tons of of hundreds of bytes, blames his opponent as having “troubles with reality,” “intentionally misleading” with “lies,” and “actively making s*** up.”

Chaincode and similarly-minded Brink builders assume that Bitcoin’s hottest queue of transactions ought to relay massive OP_RETURN outputs that include knowledge irrelevant to the motion of BTC.

In the meantime, conservatives discover this accommodative coverage preposterous, tantamount to a subversion of Bitcoin’s goal by company pursuits.

Luke Dashjr, a number one conservative searching for to retain and even tighten OP_RETURN’s 83-byte filter within the OP_RETURN struggle, can be bored with pleasantries.

Dashjr is asking his opposition “spam apologists,” “corrupt,” “scammers,” and “bad actors.” He additionally blamed Poinsot for “gaslighting,” and accused a Bitcoin Core developer of deliberately hacking one in every of his code repositories.

Learn extra: Bitcoin nodes protesting OP_RETURN change hit all-time excessive

Bitcoin OP_RETURN conservatives activate Knots nodes

In a sign of opposition, conservatives are downloading and syncing Knots full nodes to the Bitcoin community. Versus Bitcoin Core maintainers’ intention to lift the OP_RETURN datacarrier cap, Knots’ maintainer Dashjr intends to retain the cap. 

Knots nodes have greater than doubled in Might. Certainly, by Sunday, Knots had rallied to an all-time excessive of 8.3% of public nodes.

In an try to discourage Knots operators, a thread about safety vulnerabilities went viral over the weekend.

It highlighted Dashjr as its sole maintainer, his “terrible security track record,” and its similarity to Bitcoin Core — particularly in accepting OP_RETURN transactions inside legitimate blocks. 

The thread, merely claiming that utilizing Knots will “harm your fee estimation,” conveniently omitted the effectiveness of over 15 years of Bitcoin’s 83-byte-or-lower OP_RETURN datacarrier for Bitcoin Core’s default mempool.

Certainly, Bitcoin Core’s 83-byte restrict on mempool relays has prevented OP_RETURN outputs exceeding 83 bytes from 99% of all mined transactions since Bitcoin’s creation.

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