Bitcoin Devs Smash OP-RETURN Limit—Is Blockchain The New Wastepaper Basket? 🗑️💥

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In a room choked with cigar smoke, Greg Sanders—whose eyes know too much about unspent outputs—posted an austere announcement on GitHub. Bitcoin Core’s next release, he declared, will loosen its pious grip on OP_RETURN outputs. “Let more bytes flow,” he might have muttered, had he possessed the poetic folly of a minor character in a provincial theatre troupe.

The 80-byte barrier, long intended as a “gentle signal,” now shows the effectiveness of a law in a village where everyone ignores the constable. Block space, once sacred, now overrun with the digital equivalent of town gossip and personal ads. Mr. Sanders, brushing coal dust from his sleeves, confessed the limit had lived too long. Like an old postman still collecting letters after the telegraph arrived.

This proposal sprang forth—like a fresh loaf from a bakery nobody asked for—by the hand of Peter Todd, under the perspicacious gaze of Chaincode Labs. OP_RETURN, for the uninitiated, is an innovation beloved by those who think the blockchain a suitable place for diary entries, cryptic epitaphs, or, in 2024, inscribing their admiration for pixelated frogs.

Unlike real outputs—those sturdy peasants of the digital realm—OP_RETURN outputs are not spendable. They bloat not the notorious UTXO set, but they do evoke the spirit of writing poetry on the side of train cars: defiant, inscrutable, and inconvenient for everyone else.

a sleeker UTXO set, steady uniformity across the chain, a blockchain that, at last, matches how people are actually misusing it. Consider it an honest surrender.

The great minds considered three fates—maintain the cap, raise it, or toss it aside entirely. In the timeless tradition of committees, they went with the option that provoked the most energetic shrugs.

A controversial change to Bitcoin

“Many users find this to be an undesirable change for a number of reasons,” Samson Mow tweeted, no doubt wearing a hat at a rakish angle. “Stay on version 29.0, or, like a true iconoclast, run your own network,” he suggested—presumably while peeling potatoes or shoveling snow.

Critics, finding consensus more elusive than the last piece of cake at a child’s birthday, grumbled about the process. Marty Bent, an earnest man with all the humor of a tax inspector, declared, “there is no consensus at the moment on this OP_RETURN issue.” In Bitcoin, as in village life, that hardly ever stops anyone from acting.

Some muttered darkly about Bitcoin forsaking its noble financial callings for gossip and graffiti, and others conjured up specters of undisclosed conflicts of interest. There was, as ever, a sense the samovar had been left unattended one cup too many.

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2025-05-06 09:25