Overnight this morning, the conclusion of the May Federal Reserve interest rate meeting was released in the 5.8 Jiaolian internal reference.“The Fed does not cut interest rates and continues to shrink its balance sheet”After a short-term retracement, BTC quickly rebounded and aimed at the resistance level of 99k.

Recently, a proposal to remove the size limit on additional data carried by OP_RETURN in the Bitcoin Core client has caused a stir in the industry. Typical advocates like developer Peter Todd have repeatedly submitted PRs (Pull Requests), showing a determination to not give up until the goal is achieved.

On July 23, 2023, Peter Todd submitted PR#28130 proposing to remove the restriction on data carried by OP_RETURN. The PR was closed and not accepted.

On April 28, 2025, he was relentless and resubmitted the same proposal PR#32359, demanding aggressively not only the removal of additional data restrictions but also the deletion of configuration options to prevent client software users from using options to lift the restrictions themselves.

The proposal has been opposed by the majority.

Another developer instagibbs has proposed another slightly milder proposal PR#32406. He proposes to temporarily retain the configuration option, but not restrict it by default.

This proposal has more criticism than praise. instagibbs also wrote an explanation for this, explaining the origin of OP_RETURN and why such changes are proposed.

Typical opponents such as developer Luke Dashjr. He is the maintainer of the Bitcoin Knots client software and was also a fierce opponent of the inscription two years ago. You can review the relevant articles on the chain before.

For ordinary readers, to simply understand this issue, Gate can make an analogy like this:

Remove extra data restrictions + execute additional data on the virtual machine = Ethereum

Of course, in fact, it’s not that simple. Bitcoin’s ledger is stateless UTXO model, to transform the ledger to be able to store state data (which will bring new issues like state explosion), it will approach the design of Ethereum.

Anyway, it was the Bitcoin Core’s refusal to allow Vitalik Buterin to use the additional data capability of the Bitcoin ledger to realize his vision of smart contracts that forced him to create the Ethereum project.

And in this cycle so far, those who bet on Ethereum to outperform BTC must have seen a lot of grassland animals galloping past in their hearts.

Because this capability is just a feature of the client software, not part of the Bitcoin protocol consensus, so there is no need to worry that this controversy will lead to a hard fork like that in 2017.

The main reasons for support include: many modified clients have long since lifted this restriction and have received support from certain mining pools; perhaps it can bring more incentives to miners; the limitation of OP_RETURN’s ability cannot stop people from using other abilities such as multisig and taproot script to carry data ingeniously, and instead, the limitation forces the fragmentation of UTXO due to the split and splicing of data; it is better to loosen than to block, and there is no one-size-fits-all method to accurately identify what is junk data, which is doomed to be a futile cat-and-mouse game; and so on.

The main reasons for opposition include: lifting data restrictions may cause the Bitcoin ledger to expand rapidly, weakening decentralization; bringing a large number of non-financial applications, weakening the positioning of BTC, making it degraded to a checkbook; and so on.

According to Clark Moddy’s statistics on Bitcoin, the current size of the Bitcoin blockchain is approximately 748.1GB, with OP_RETURN additional data accounting for about 3.83GB, or approximately 0.5%.

There is currently no definitive conclusion that the relevant PR will be merged and released. However, judging from the community’s voting with their feet, the number of nodes using the slimmed-down version of Bitcoin Knots now exceeds the number of nodes running the latest version of Bitcoin Core 29.0.

Perhaps we will witness a historic moment: Bitcoin, as a consensus, does not actually have to rely on a single dominant client software. (Although this is a fact, it’s just that many people are not aware of it)

A diverse, bitcoin ecosystem where two to three equally powerful Bitcoin client software, code repositories, and developer maintenance teams balance each other, following a set of Bitcoin consensus, unity in diversity, fighting without breaking, wouldn’t it be more able to highlight the charm of decentralization of Bitcoin?

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