There’s a hefty battle over the preferred Bitcoin software implementation.One side wants to boost the amount of data the blockchain can register.This would throw a lifeline to struggling Bitcoin miners.Yet, others warn it will enable the spread of child pornography.
A holy war over Bitcoin’s immutable code just went ballistic.
Over the weekend, a pseudonymous developer proposed a Bitcoin soft fork that would permanently ban most data storage at the protocol level.
The proposal includes a new feature that would trigger whenever miners encounter illegal content, potentially causing blockchain reorganisations.
Moreover, leaked messages show Luke Dashjr, a longtime Bitcoin developer, discussing the fork plan due to legal concerns about node operators hosting data. Those messages were first published by industry outlet The Rage.
The words “legal” and “law” appear more than 10 times in the proposal’s motivation section, leading critics like Jameson Lopp to call it “legal coercion.”
The fork proposal escalates a fight that’s been brewing for months over an update to Bitcoin Core, the network’s largest client, which raised the limit on how much data can be registered on the blockchain.
What started as a technical debate over an 80-byte data limit is now threatening to split Bitcoin’s $2.2 trillion blockchain.
‘The debate is existential to Bitcoin.’
— Lukas Duczko, CEO of Blink Wallet
80-byte limit
At the centre of the storm is an update to the network’s largest client, called Core, which raised the limit on how much data can be registered on the blockchain.
Proponents of increasing the limit argue that the existing 80-byte ceiling backfires.
Instead of preventing data storage, it pushes users to disguise arbitrary data as Bitcoin addresses — permanently bloating the database that every node must maintain. Allowing larger limits would let users store data without clogging the system.
The change could also throw a lifeline to struggling Bitcoin miners who have watched their transaction fees plummet to existential levels.
But increasing the limit, allege critics, will turn Bitcoin’s ledger into a cesspool of child porn and racy content because the change makes it much easier to store any kind of data onto the blockchain.
“Even if we had a magic wand to make the legal risk disappear, turning Bitcoin into a CSAM-friendly file sharing network would still be fatal,” Dashjr wrote on X, referring to child sexual abuse material.
“No decent human being would willingly run such a network.”
The battle pits advocates of Bitcoin Core — the dominant software implementation that seeks to increase the data limit — against Bitcoin Knots, an alternative largely maintained by Dashjr that enforces stricter rules against using the blockchain for anything other than money.
Both implementations follow the same consensus rules, meaning they recognise the same valid blocks and transactions.
The difference comes down to what should and shouldn’t be allowed on the blockchain.
It’s a difference, some say, of life or death for the network.
“The debate is existential to Bitcoin,” Lukas Duczko, CEO of Blink Wallet, told DL News.
“It is about how to define the roadmap and who should define it.”
OP_RETURN
At the centre of the debate is a key feature of the network called OP_RETURN, which Core developers introduced in 2014.
At that time, users were already storing arbitrary data on the blockchain by encoding it into fake Bitcoin addresses. Users were doing this because they believed in Bitcoin as a decentralised database for all things digital — not just money.
These transactions created Bitcoin which can never be spent but only serve to clog up the network of all coins that every node keeps a record of.
As the network became more congested, storage prices rose and transaction speeds slowed.
OP_RETURN provided an alternative. The opcode is a special type of transaction explicitly designed for storing small amounts of data.
Bitcoin Core set an 80-byte limit on these outputs to discourage large-scale data storage while providing a release valve for legitimate use cases like time-stamping documents.
More than a decade later, the opcode is now being relitigated.
Knots camp
Critics of raising the byte limit are furious.
Dashjr, who maintains Bitcoin Knots — the leading alternative client implementation with stricter filtering rules — has galloped forward as Core’s most vocal opponent.
Approximately 5,177 nodes are now running Bitcoin Knots, according to data from Coin Dance. That translates to 21% of all public nodes, a staggering fourfold increase from the 5% it began at this year.
To Dashjr, making it easier to store arbitrary data on Bitcoin undermines its primary purpose as money.
He did not reply to a request for comment from DL News.
The Knots faction worries that removing the limit signals to spammers that they’re welcome on Bitcoin. Because blockspace is limited, using it for storage could fill…