Knots ‘warning’ escalates Bitcoin OP_RETURN war
The gloves are off in this year’s revival of Bitcoin’s 2010 OP_RETURN war.
Weeks into a heated impasse, the leader of the progressive movement seeking to ease data storage limits on Bitcoin Core mempools has dispensed with intellectual arguments, and underhanded rhetoric masquerading as a security warning has gone viral.
Antoine Poinsot of Chaincode Labs, the originator of pull request (PR) 32359 to increase OP_RETURN’s datacarrier limit from 83 to hundreds of thousands of bytes, blames his opponent as having “troubles with reality,” “intentionally misleading” with “lies,” and “actively making s*** up.”
Chaincode and similarly-minded Brink developers think that Bitcoin’s most popular queue of transactions should relay large OP_RETURN outputs that contain data irrelevant to the movement of BTC.
Meanwhile, conservatives find this accommodative policy preposterous, tantamount to a subversion of Bitcoin’s purpose by corporate interests.
Luke Dashjr, a leading conservative seeking to retain or even tighten OP_RETURN’s 83-byte filter in the OP_RETURN war, is also tired of pleasantries.
Dashjr is calling his opposition “spam apologists,” “corrupt,” “scammers,” and “bad actors.” He also blamed Poinsot for “gaslighting,” and accused a Bitcoin Core developer of intentionally hacking one of his code repositories.
Read more: Bitcoin nodes protesting OP_RETURN change hit all-time high
Bitcoin OP_RETURN conservatives turn on Knots nodes
In a signal of opposition, conservatives are downloading and syncing Knots full nodes to the Bitcoin network. As opposed to Bitcoin Core maintainers’ intention to raise the OP_RETURN datacarrier cap, Knots’ maintainer Dashjr intends to retain the cap.
Knots nodes have more than doubled in May. Indeed, by Sunday, Knots had rallied to an all-time high of 8.3% of public nodes.
In an attempt to discourage Knots operators, a thread about security vulnerabilities went viral over the weekend.
It highlighted Dashjr as its sole maintainer, his “terrible security track record,” and its similarity to Bitcoin Core — especially in accepting OP_RETURN transactions within valid blocks.
The thread, merely claiming that using 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.
Indeed, Bitcoin Core’s 83-byte limit 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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