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The 
Bitcoin NFT schism that I wrote about earlier this year has officially boiled over into soft fork saber rattling.
As 
Eric Wall has suggested, what we're seeing now in the Bitcoin community is a cultural war that has coalesced around a technical dispute over spam. And that war is intensifying.
At stake is Bitcoin's soul. Should the protocol stay neutral and open or enforce guardrails against 
Ordinals (a.k.a. durable Bitcoin NFTs) and other non-monetary data?
I know where I stand in this debate. Neutrality, neutrality, neutrality. That's how Bitcoin stays Bitcoin. But let's catch you up on this showdown so you can get a pulse of the situation, too.
This week's flashpoint
The basic context here is that Bitcoin Core’s maintainers recently unveiled their v30 release.
- Notably, v30 expanded Bitcoin's OP_RETURN data field from 80 bytes to 100 kilobytes (a 1280x increase!) and lowered the minimum relay fee to 0.1 sat/vB.
- These changes ultimately make it much easier to store data on Bitcoin, which means various BTC-centric metaprotocols—e.g. Ordinals, Runes, etc.—can now work more efficiently.
- In short, v30 made Bitcoin friendlier to builders.
As such, for the Ordinals crowd, this release was a win for Bitcoin's neutrality and pragmatism. Anyone can build on Bitcoin's blockspace, and now more easily than before, so long as they pay their fees.
As for the Core devs, v30 is a continuation of a long-standing principle that Bitcoin should be governed by economics, not ideology. Yet some critics have cast this update as an existential threat to Bitcoin itself.
The reaction
On the flip side here is the Bitcoin Knots / Ocean Mining camp led by Luke Dashjr.
Knots is a fork of Bitcoin Core that lets users filter transactions related to Ordinals, Runes, and so on, while Ocean Mining is a Bitcoin mining pool that offers support for Knots miners and thus filtering. Both efforts are spearheaded by Dashjr.
This camp decries things like Ordinals as worthless JPG spam and vectors for illegal material. To them, though, anything on Bitcoin that isn't directly centered around BTC payments is unforgivable shitcoinery.
As you can imagine, then, the Knots and Mining folks became incensed in the wake of the v30 release. For example, here are some remarks I've seen on X from this faction in recent days:
- "Time to [soft fork] again."
- "Bitcoin is dead if Core30 isn't stopped."
- "Core is trying to turn Bitcoin into Ethereum."
- "Any use case that isn't making sending and receiving sats cheaper or more private is an abuse case."
You get the idea. When I wrote about this discourse back in June, no one from this camp was calling for soft forking Bitcoin. Fast forward to today, and forking chatter has now started taking off.
Of course, a soft fork isn't a hard fork that would lead to a chain split. Yet the political temperature is starting to resemble 2017 all over again.
Back then, the block size wars were about how much data Bitcoin should hold. Now, the fight is over what kind of data belongs onchain here, and this fight has become a proxy to a larger war for "control over the default settings of the majority [Bitcoin] client," as Eric Wall has put it.
The Knots faction is framing this schism as a moral and existential struggle to “save” Bitcoin from contamination, and now they're eyeing reimposing stricter OP_RETURN limits via a soft fork.
Whether that fork will actualize remains to be seen, but the concept's embrace is certainly an escalation in Bitcoin's ongoing Core vs. Knots struggle.
Zooming out
Bitcoin is open tech. It should remain open tech.
No one's made this case more eloquently than former Bitcoin Core dev Greg Maxwell, who wrote on bitcointalk.org yesterday:
"[C]ore's commitment to individual freedom, self determination, and related principals is great enough that they recognize that some wasteful or stupid traffic is the cost of an open system, and that speculative small improvements related to 'spam' aren't worth risking properties that underlie Bitcoin's entire reason for existence."
100% that. Ultimately, the network's job is order transactions and verify signatures. Let the market decide what fills blocks. This approach is what's best for Bitcoin, both now and long-term.
In the meantime, though, we'll just have to wait and see if this fresh spate of soft fork discourse dies down or gains steam. My bet's on the latter, and who knows what comes after that...
