Bitcoin dev Gloria Zhao deletes X account over OP_RETURN drama
After personal attacks and drama during this month’s OP_RETURN war over non-financial data storage on Bitcoin’s blockchain, senior Bitcoin Core maintainer Gloria Zhao has deleted her X account.
In the words of the developer responsible for the OP_RETURN proposal that started the war in April, Chaincode Labs’ Antoine Poinsot, the proposal was “heavily mediatized” and inflicted “a lot of wasted time to everybody.”
It also erased one of the most popular developers from Bitcoin’s most active social media network.
In the days leading up to her X resignation, Zhao had become a vocal proponent for lifting OP_RETURN’s mempool datacarrier relay limit from 83 to hundreds of thousands of bytes. In essence, the change would have accommodated more non-financial data on Bitcoin’s ledger, like photos, games, third-party code, and business data.
Her reasoning, like many of her Chaincode Labs and Brink colleagues, was that the limit was antiquated and essentially pointless because of alternative data storage elsewhere.
She felt Bitcoin Core node software, by default, should accept and relay any large OP_RETURN outputs across its mempool queue of pending transactions.
That way, node operators would have a better view of fees and the transactions most likely to join Bitcoin’s next block.
Conserving Bitcoin’s chain for BTC transactions
Although Zhao enjoyed plenty of support from her side of the debate, she also received an equal amount of negative feedback from the opposition.
Defending OP_RETURN’s 83-byte limit is a large and growing number of conservative Bitcoin node operators who see no reason to ease storage for non-bitcoin (BTC) data. They call the photos and third-party data stuffed into OP_RETURN outputs “spam.”
Read more: Bitcoin nodes protesting OP_RETURN change hit all-time high
Lifting the 83-byte cap would only encourage more spam, conservatives argued, and arguments about modernization or harmonization of OP_RETURN with other data storage options by people like Zhao were unpersuasive.
Even imperfect limits can serve as deterrents, they argued.
In their view, the job of Bitcoin Core is to preserve a reference client for node operators to validate BTC transactions — not operate a distributed database akin to cloud storage.
In any case, Zhao was on the side of easing OP_RETURN’s datacarrier limit. That made her eminently unpopular with her conservative opposition, including one of its leaders, BitcoinMechanic.
Gloria Zhao waves goodbye to OP_RETURN drama
In a livestream on April 29, BitcoinMechanic bemoaned developers like Zhao and others who argued for the more progressive software default. At one point, he even attacked her credentials and credited her romantic relationship with another senior developer as a major reason she enjoyed GitHub code commit access.
Retellings of that clip went viral on X as the OP_RETURN war waged on. Soon, in a classic telephone game-like mutation, BitcoinMechanic’s accusation of a simple love interest morphed into an implication that Zhao had “slept with someone to get her job.”
Although BitcoinMechanic never made that explicit accusation, many people attacked him for the insinuation.
Zhao also received more recent, negative attention after critics pointed out her role in wordplaying the definition of “deprecated” to serve her own interests.
For whatever variety of reasons, Zhao has decided that her time on X has come to an end. She also has deleted her entire history of tweets and replies.
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