The post Bitcoin dev Gloria Zhao deletes X account over OP_RETURN drama appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

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…

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Filed under: News - @ May 15, 2025 1:23 pm