The post Bitcoin nodes protesting OP_RETURN change hit all-time high appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Since Bitcoin Core developers began proposing a controversial increase to the data storage capacity of a Bitcoin script operation code, the number of node operators protesting that change has hit an all-time high. Internet-connected full nodes propagating Knots-tagged blocks that reject the proposed increased data limit have doubled since the OP_RETURN war began last month. Core has 19,662 reachable nodes, while Knots is the second-most popular client at 1,464. On April 17, Chaincode Labs’ Antoine Poinsot reintroduced Peter Todd’s pull request (PR) 28130 that asked Core contributors to lift the roughly 80-byte restriction on the datacarrier limit OP_RETURN outputs. As Core contributors indicated their willingness to proceed with the change, software downloads of an alternate full node client, Knots, skyrocketed.  As disagreements divided the Bitcoin community, Peter Todd eventually formalized the request as PR 32359. Despite dozens of reviewers voting “NACK” — shorthand for “negative acknowledgement” — Blockstream engineer and Core contributor Greg Sanders wrote that Core was planning to implement PR 32359 within a few days.  Knots’ default mempool will not lift the datacarrier limit of OP_RETURN, no matter what Core decides. Therefore, the growth of reachable Knots nodes — which reached an all-time high of 6.5% yesterday, according to tracker Coin.dance — is a proxy for measuring the resistance movement. Corporate interests versus Bitcoin’s preeminence For the larger data limit camp, increasing OP_RETURN’s datacarrier simply normalizes its on-chain data storage limits with other ways to store arbitrary data in bitcoin transactions, such as witness outputs. Removing OP_RETURN’s 80-byte cap is a simple, unremarkable upgrade, according to their rhetoric. For the smaller data limit camp, many of whom run Knots, the proposal is evidence that Bitcoin Core developers are succumbing to corporate and venture capital interests in using Bitcoin’s largest mempool as a distributed database. Allowing easier proliferation and…

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Filed under: News - @ May 7, 2025 1:21 pm