Bitcoin developers are again in contradiction about how the oldest and largest blockchain in the world should manage the storage of information on the chain, with a proposal to relax long -standing limits for the size of the data held by a fierce debate to recall the battles of 2023 on ordinals.
The Blockchain’s OP_PRETURN function allows people to attach an additional piece of data to a transaction that it is often used for things like notes, horodatages or digital recordings. The change proposed, put forward by the developer Peter Todd, would remove the ceiling of 80 bytes on such data, a limit initially designed to discourage spam and preserve the financial integrity of the blockchain.
Supporters argue that the current limit is useless because users are already bypassing it using tapot transactions, to hide the data in the parts of the transaction intended for cryptographic signatures. This is how ordinals and inscriptions work (and why they have their criticisms): they integrate images or text into tapot transactions which are often infesdules, transforming the Bitcoin blockchain into a type of data storage system.
The developer of Bitcoin Core, Luke Dashjr, a vocal critic of ordinals, which he has long labeled a “spam attack” against blockchain, described the proposal for “total madness” and warned that the release of data restrictions would accelerate what he considers the degradation of Bitcoin’s financial end.
“It should be useless to say, but this idea is total madness,” said Dashjr. “Bogues must be corrected, not the abuses kissed.”
Critics of the proposal also have another concern. The change could normalize the storage of illegal content, degrade the fungibility of the chain and transform nodes operators into involuntary hosts of malware and copyright violations.
To demonstrate the potential maelstrom that this can bring, an ordinary team has scored an entire Nintendo 64 emulator on the blockchain, which could draw the attention of Nintendo, a company known to have protected its intellectual property.
Supporters of the change, notably Pieter Wuille and Sjors provoost, argued that the relaxing limits OP_return can in fact reduce what is called UTXO (output of the unat -spent transaction), a phenomenon which slows down the blockchain when the network is cluttered with non -financial transactions and the fragmentation of Mempool.
UTXO Bloat is a documented side effect of ordinals and inscriptions using tapot transactions. For example, in May 2023, at the height of the popularity of computers, the Bitcoin blockchain became so congestioned that the binance had to suspend the withdrawals of Bitcoin (BTC) for a number of hours.
“The request exists,” wrote Wuille. “And pushing it outside the public relay network only makes more important damage.”
For the moment, the proposal remains under examination. One thing is certain: the intensity of the debate on the GitHub and Blockchain broadcast lists shows that the battle for the identity of Bitcoin is far from over.
