Why don't we just quickly soft fork to disallow large OP_RETURN outputs (i.e. keep them capped to 80 bytes) only, with forward-looking activation (no retroactive block invalidation)? This would give the market a clear and simple way to decide whether such transactions are acceptable or not. It wouldn't have any of the issues mentioned so far in the discussion like creating an incentive to put CSAM or other illegal content to attempt a reorg double spend due to the complex deployment mechanism proposed in BIP-444 or like putting in jeopardy existing Taproot functionality by touching other primitives. We don't actually need to remove all the mechanisms that can be used for embedding data (which has been demonstrated to be impossible). Rather what we need is to give users the opportunity to signal whether arbitrary data is welcome or not.
If the legal concerns are compelling enough to warrant consensus changes, miners should support a clean soft fork immediately. If the market quickly adopts the new consensus-level OP_RETURN restrictions it would announce sufficiently clearly to the world that arbitrary data is not welcome and deter future attempts to bring that to Bitcoin by showing the network's readiness to resist such efforts. I believe that this PR is too dramatic and needlessly complicated for what we need: letting the market decide whether to accept or reject the explicit invitation for arbitrary data storage that Core v30 has created. Technical changes should be limited to this question only and simple enough for people to make a decision without being distracted or overwhelmed by adjacent issues. On Monday, October 27, 2025 at 10:53:31 AM UTC-6 Jal Toorey wrote: > "bitcoin is money" > > The definition of what is money is extremely subjective. The history of > it shows this (not the history saifedean paints). Trying to direct the > development to capture a definition of money opens a huge attack vector. > It's not different than trying to decide what is spam. > > Also what is the difference between the bashers slogan that bitcoin is p2p > money and "bitcoin is money" They seem like the same thing? > On Sunday, October 26, 2025 at 3:43:26 PM UTC-7 Peter Todd wrote: > >> On Sat, Oct 25, 2025 at 08:43:11PM +0000, dathonohm via Bitcoin >> Development Mailing List wrote: >> > Hi list - >> > >> > Due to Bitcoin Core v30 gaining in popularity, it has become necessary >> to move forward on [luke-jr's ML proposal]( >> https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/2017) to temporarily limit >> arbitrary data at the consensus level, which so far has 3 weeks with no >> objections: >> > >> > https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/2017 >> >> Transaction >> 8e2ee13d2a19951c2777bb3a54f0cb69a2f76dae8baa954cd86149ed1138cb6c >> contains the full text of this BIP as of writing(1), while simultaneously >> being >> compliant with that BIP. >> >> Clearly, this approach is ineffective. >> >> 1) >> https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/3c718237072c107ced8c3531a487354fbdae55df/bip-%3F%3F%3F%3F.mediawiki >> >> >> -- >> https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Bitcoin Development Mailing List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/2774a0b5-fd65-494b-ac23-f3726754eda7n%40googlegroups.com.
