Last week, in a moment of distinctively despicable behavior, a small group of developers tried to quietly change the default Mempool policy for Bitcoin Core, the world’s dominant software for full nodes.
After reintroducing a failed proposal in 2023 to increase the data storage capabilities of OP_Return output, critics flagged copycats in 2025 before consolidating them into production. Colloquially, some call the astonishing incident a kind of Bitcoin op_return war.
Mononaut joked that it was similar to forking Bitcoin for quantum resistance, skipping mailing lists and BIP processes, and jumping straight into production.
Critics were called Pull Request (PR) 32359 Chaos, Madness, Madness, Consensus, Shenangans, and Destruction, written by Peter Todd. Meanwhile, the supporters said that PR standardizes Mempool policy and modernizes transactions that often catalog arbitrary data elsewhere, even before this OP_Return proposal.
Ultimately, concerns about censoring conflicting perspectives, stripping of Bitcoin’s financial utility, and private company profits have stopped PR 32359 from merging into the mainnet.
op_returnWar for Harm Reduction
In Backfoot, camp, which supports lifting the limits of Op_return data carriers, quickly reasserted its actions as a brave attempt to “reduce harm” for the long-term benefits of Bitcoin.
The camp developers explained their proposals in simple language. Allows users to pack large amounts of data into blocks via OP_RETURN They simply standardized the already common practice of storing non-financial data. In the unconventional part of the Bitcoin block, like Taproot output.
Users already store random text, images, computer codes and other non-financial data in the Bitcoin block anyway. Worse, many of them take advantage of Segwit Witness discounts to pay a heavily discounted storage rate.
Why claim the 83-byte limit for Op_return when there are plenty of options elsewhere? Certainly, normalizing OP_Return with other data storage options would reduce the harm.
read more: Profits of companies taking over Bitcoin development
Bravely, some of them argued that lifting up the data aviation restrictions on op_return equaled “reducing harm.” In their view, they would “instead of moving forward with citrea writing permanently to the utxo set” of op_return payloads of 100 bytes or more.
Citrea 100-byte payload – 17 bytes larger than Op_return limit
According to senior Bitcoin developer Peter Todd, Bitcoin Project Citrea, backed by venture capitalists, must publish 100-byte data packets for certain operations. Unfortunately, the 83-byte size limit for OP_RETURN exposes non-publicable output instead of the more desirable OP_RETURN.
Write permanently to a set of clueless transaction outputs (UTXO), Citrea has grown the number of UTXOS. Use valuable calculations to verify UTXOS created by ever-increasing amounts of citrus fruit.
This was the “harm” PR 32359 “decreased” in the detailed Stackernews thread’s view of Mark “Murch “Erhardt.
read more: Moderators censor Bitcoin development as the op_return war intensifies
ChainCode Labs Bitcoin developers explained that lifting the DataCarrier limit for Op_return allows corporate entities such as Citrea to operate more efficiently.
Peter Todd, creator of PR 32359 on Chaincode Lab’s Antoine Pointe Sot Request, said, “Size limitations prompted entities like citrea to open (PR 32359) as they use non-publicable output instead of Op_return (PR 32359).
Jameson Ropp says there is no conflict of interest
Jameson Lopp, an investor at Citrea and advocate for PR 32359, denies that investments in Citrea have created conflicts of interest regarding Op_return’s DataCarrier limits.
According to his cited explanation, “The Citrea protocol doesn’t benefit at all from this change! We ask them to use op_return to not bloat the Utxo set.”
In any case, the request to change this important default value of Bitcoin Core Software led to a short kind of OP_return war among Bitcoin Maintenance this month, not to mention limiting the ability of users to self-construct that value as a self-powered Bitcoin Core Node operator.
The debate continues over the weekend, and could continue this week as a social media frenzy like Github, Bitcoin-Dev Google Group, Stackernews, Reddit, Bitcointalk, X and more.
