In recent days, there has been a lot of discussion on external networks regarding the proposal to remove the OP_RETURN limit—this proposal was put forward by Bitcoin Core OG developer Peter Todd.

(It is worth mentioning that Peter Todd was identified as Satoshi Nakamoto in the HBO-promoted documentary "The Mysterious World of Bitcoin," which led him to receive numerous funding requests and threats, and he is currently living in hiding.)

Although there are many doubts about this OPRETURN change within the community, according to Bitcoin developer and Blockstream core contributor Greg Sanders (nickname "instagibbs"), who announced on May 5 on GitHub: in the next network upgrade, Bitcoin Core will no longer impose any byte or quantity limits on OPRETURN.

What exactly is OP_RETURN?

We all know that Bitcoin is an immutable ledger, where each transaction is like writing a line of record on it.

OP_RETURN is like sticking a "note" on the edge of a page—you can write dozens of words or small pieces of data into it, and this note is marked by the system as "read-only," meaning it cannot be used as money and does not affect the records of other "money" in the ledger.

The reason for having such a "note" function is that sometimes people want to permanently attach some extra information (such as legal proofs, short messages, anniversaries, or even confessions) to the chain, but do not want to occupy the UTXO space used for storing "spendable" bitcoins. With OP_RETURN, this information is like waste paper thrown into a drawer—nodes only leave a trace without occupying space, and the "available money" on the chain remains clean and tidy.

In the past, to prevent someone from writing long "notes" and clogging the network, Bitcoin Core by default only allowed one OP_RETURN per transaction, with a maximum content size of 80 bytes. If exceeded, nodes would directly refuse to relay and would not assist in packaging.

Now, the 80-byte and single-entry limits are gone—write as long as you want, multiple notes are allowed, and nodes will automatically relay, while miners will be happy to package them.

However, in fact, there have always been ways to bypass the 80-byte limit.

Even when there was an OP_RETURN restriction, there were methods to circumvent the 80-byte limit; no matter how strict the filtering and relaying strategies were, they could not stop those who truly wanted to write data on Bitcoin. Because only miners and transaction fees determine which transactions get on-chain, offering miners higher rewards naturally leads them to package more transactions, and the gameplay does not change due to node strategies.

For example, many people know that the Tapoort Wizz NFT wizard stuffed a nearly 4M image into a block, and in the past, Ordinals inscriptions and runes used various "workarounds" to bypass the restrictions, with some even written into spendable outputs, taking up even more resources.

Does this align more with the spirit of Bitcoin?

According to the announcement released by Bitcoin developer Greg Sanders on GitHub and various developer endorsements, we can see that Bitcoin Core has its own "standardness policy" during the transaction relay phase, which serves three layers of checks before transactions reach miners: first, to prevent "denial of service" attacks by rejecting transactions that consume far more computational power, memory, or bandwidth than their fees; second, to guide wallet authors to construct transactions that save fees and do not create redundant UTXOs; third, to maintain upgrade safety—treating unknown opcodes or version bits as "non-standard" until a soft fork is officially activated.

OP_RETURN and its 80-byte limit are products of this philosophy: providing users with a provably "unspendable" output that can store small commitments or hashes while allowing nodes not to count it towards UTXO, thus avoiding "wasted" outputs on the chain.

However, this soft limit has now become a hindrance. On one hand, private mining pools and some centralized services do not enforce this rule at all; anyone wanting to write large amounts of data can bypass the strategy—either by directly paying miners or using bare-multisig, fake public keys, or even spendable scripts to hide the information—still getting the content onto the chain; on the other hand, constantly adding a bunch of blacklist filters will only evolve into a "cat-and-mouse" game, failing to stop basic data writing while increasing the risk of mistakenly harming user funds.

Proponents of the change believe that completely removing the 80-byte limit will bring two significant benefits to nodes and wallets: first, the UTXO set will be cleaner, with data stored in a clear "unspendable" OP_RETURN output rather than tangled in various fancy scripts or multiple transactions; second, nodes will have a more unified stance on which transactions to relay, aligning with what miners actually package, making wallet fee estimations and compact block relaying more reliable.

Bitcoin developers compared three proposals, and the currently adopted "removal" proposal has the strongest momentum in the community. More importantly, they believe that this removal of the OP_RETURN limit is the best interpretation of Bitcoin's "transparency and simplicity" spirit: when a strategy has lost its intended function but is still retained, it only adds complexity and friction; removing it makes node software lighter and purer, allowing each transaction's propagation and packaging to proceed without detours—miners only need to prioritize based on fee levels, and the fee market naturally adjusts to various competitive demands.

If there is indeed a threat of excessive writing and resource consumption on-chain, the Bitcoin ecosystem has a whole set of tested "targeted" protections: signature operation limits, limits on the number of ancestor and descendant transactions, dust rules… these precise measures targeting specific abuse scenarios are much more flexible than a one-size-fits-all "80 bytes" and can protect every node and user without harming normal usage.

Will BTC become a shitcoin?

Among the most well-known opponents is Luke Dashjr.

As a Bitcoin OG, he has previously stated that "the Ordinals protocol is an attack on Bitcoin" and "inscriptions are garbage, a bug that can be fixed." Luke Dashjr has been an outspoken critic of the Ordinals protocol.

This time, he remains firmly on the "conservative" side, believing that removing the OP_RETURN limit is a very crazy thing and an attack on Bitcoin. He and others believe that removing the limit will lead to spam and higher transaction fees.

It is evident that the current debate and points of contention focus on whether removing the 80-byte OP_RETURN limit will enhance transparency and simplify Bitcoin's data usage, or whether it will open the door to abuse, spam, and a deviation of Bitcoin from its financial focus.

Jason, vice president of Ocean Mining Pool, is one of the strongest critics, stating that he has lost sleep over this and even bluntly saying, "This change will turn Bitcoin into a worthless shitcoin."

Willem Schroe, founder of Botanix Labs, expressed that he believes developers should treat Bitcoin as a currency system rather than a data storage platform. Another Bitcoin core developer, Mechanic, shares a similar view: Bitcoin should not be used for arbitrary file storage, and all possible measures should be taken to ensure this.

Some influential KOLs in the industry, such as Samson Mow, are encouraging node operators not to upgrade their Bitcoin Core versions or to switch to Knots.

As of the time of writing, according to Clark Mood's data, the usage rate of Bitcoin Knots nodes has surpassed that of the latest version of Bitcoin Core nodes.

This is yet another challenge to Bitcoin consensus, just like many that have occurred before. Of course, it also makes us realize that while Bitcoin is more conservative than most networks, it is not immutable; after the next upgrade, we may also see more concise and elegant protocol gameplay than Ordinals, Atomicals, or Runes.

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