Bitcoin’s OP_RETURN war just went nuclear: a chain fork proposal
A Bitcoin fork proposed this weekend would commence an activation period for updating consensus rules to limit data storage unrelated to the on-chain movement of BTC In a dramatic escalation of this year’s OP_RETURN war, pseudonymous dev “Dathon Ohm” revived Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 2017, also called “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork,” that might become BIP 444 if someone codes an activation client and formalizes it on GitHub. The new blockchain would refuse many types of common data storage for media, collectibles, roll-ups, and other novelty or business uses at its base, consensus level. Specifically, the proposal escalates disagreement over Bitcoin Core v30’s relaxed approach to queuing up to 100KB of arbitrary data per transaction in nodes’ memory pools (“mempools”). It would make such contiguous chunks of data incompatible with the blockchain’s rules for valid transactions — not just mempools’ default standar...