Nick Szabo Drops Bombshell on Bitcoin Core v30 💥💡

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In the long, quiet stretch of a digital commons, Nick Szabo-one of the old-timers who taught the first coins to walk-has dragged himself back to the village square after nearly five years to weigh in on a quarrel that smells of oil and solder. The talk centers on Bitcoin Core v30, the next big weather front promised for October, and the debate over what a ledger should carry when it isn’t money, but wants to ride shotgun on the block road anyway.

The update, due in October, has set the town whispering about how the network should handle data that isn’t coins but still wants to ride the same rails. A new release candidate, v30.0rc2, has shown its face, a hulking child of code and caffeine, following after v29.0. The notes march in progress, and the crowd eyes them like rain clouds on the horizon. The talk is loud, like a tavern full of men arguing over a map that keeps changing its rivers.

A new release candidate of Bitcoin Core, v30.0rc2, is available for testing. This is a new major release, and follows v29.0. Work-in-progress release notes are here: It is available here:

– Bitcoin Core Project (@bitcoincoreorg) September 28, 2025

The update comes with a new wallet layout and a tidy set of commands, a change that might make some travelers feel a little less lost in the dark. Yet its most controversial feature is the OP_RETURN opcode, the line that lets you press arbitrary data into a transaction like a note tucked into a pocket. Where once 80 bytes were enough to scribble a memory, now the door widens toward nearly four megabytes per transaction output-enough to stuff a small ledger into a sack and still have room for the road.

But this is the kind of room that makes purists tremble and maximalists puff their chests. Some say Bitcoin should carry nothing but money, and the rest belongs to another road. Others say space is space, and if you’ve got the money to pay for it, you should be able to use block space as you please. The debate, like a long dry season, drifts across the land with a stubborn wind.

Szabo highlights legal risks

On X, Szabo spoke of the legal land the update might trample into. He said transaction fees act as a “spam filter” for miners, but they do little to shield full node operators from what law might cast as liability. He asked the rough question that sits at the edge of town: what happens when full node operators stumble upon illegal content within the blockchain? They would know, and that knowledge could pull them into a muddy pit of blame.

Szabo described OP_RETURN data as “prunable,” something you could trim away more easily than other hides of information. He suggested that letting more data ride on OP_RETURN might ease some legal burdens, but he cautioned that storing illegal content in a standard format could draw the eyes of courts and regulators like a hawk to a chicken coop.

Community reactions

He traded ideas with other developers and voices from the village on X, talking about the weight of embedded data and who should bear it. One neighbor offered this simple, stubborn truth: “the responsibility for the data enrolled in an OP_RETURN should rest on the signer of the transaction.” Szabo nodded, saying that such a principle could be a sturdy bedrock for future statutes or regulations.

The chatter unfolds amid broader conversations in the Bitcoin world. Szabo has long denied being Satoshi Nakamoto, the architect of the town and its ledger, yet his words still carry the gravity of someone who has walked the dusty road and knows its potholes well. As the upgrade and its rules swirl, his voice remains one of the few that travelers still listen to, even when the wind changes direction and whistles through the branches of the ledger. And so the road, in its stubborn way, keeps on winding. 😏💾🚶‍♂️

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2025-09-29 14:56