I don’t understand why core 30 changed that. Even before core 30 a motivated attacker could (one of the arguments of core for changing) and it was indeed a situation where 99.9 pct of nodes were a r...
Don’t worry, you’re not the only one who doesn’t see what actually changed.
Before that release, about 99.9% of the network - both Bitcoin Core and Knots - were running policy that effectively capped OP_RETURN at around 83 bytes or less. Data storage was not considered a supported use case. Technically possible, but clearly outside the intended design. Anyone determined to do it had to hack their way in through non-standard transactions.
That mattered, because when something is possible but non-standard, the network is implicitly signaling: this isn’t what Bitcoin is for. The legal and moral hazard for node operators stayed minimal, basically zero, because these transactions were extremely rare and the ecosystem broadly agreed that Bitcoin wasn’t meant to host arbitrary data.
Then the default implementation used by 95%+ of the network changed the policy. That flipped the script. Bitcoin went from being a monetary network that merely tolerated rare data embeddings to a system that is effectively agnostic about what data gets stored in transactions. Suddenly you could insert arbitrary data in a standard, non-contiguous way through the official channel. No hacks required. Just follow the default settings. That’s a profound shift.
For sixteen years the norm was: Bitcoin was for monetary transactions, and anything else lived on the margins. With this change, the default stance quietly moved toward content neutrality. Bitcoin becomes not just money infrastructure, but a general-purpose data carrier.
That philosophical pivot has consequences far beyond technical policy. It introduces legal exposure, moral questions for node operators, and a very different set of incentives around blockspace.
Once the default policy changes at the reference client level, you can’t realistically mitigate the effect with local node policy alone. The coordination gravity of the default implementation is too strong. If the network wants to close that gap, the only durable path is tightening the rules at the consensus layer, because that’s where the highest level of network coordination actually happens.
Before that release, about 99.9% of the network - both Bitcoin Core and Knots - were running policy that effectively capped OP_RETURN at around 83 bytes or less. Data storage was not considered a supported use case. Technically possible, but clearly outside the intended design. Anyone determined to do it had to hack their way in through non-standard transactions.
That mattered, because when something is possible but non-standard, the network is implicitly signaling: this isn’t what Bitcoin is for. The legal and moral hazard for node operators stayed minimal, basically zero, because these transactions were extremely rare and the ecosystem broadly agreed that Bitcoin wasn’t meant to host arbitrary data.
Then the default implementation used by 95%+ of the network changed the policy. That flipped the script. Bitcoin went from being a monetary network that merely tolerated rare data embeddings to a system that is effectively agnostic about what data gets stored in transactions. Suddenly you could insert arbitrary data in a standard, non-contiguous way through the official channel. No hacks required. Just follow the default settings. That’s a profound shift.
For sixteen years the norm was: Bitcoin was for monetary transactions, and anything else lived on the margins. With this change, the default stance quietly moved toward content neutrality. Bitcoin becomes not just money infrastructure, but a general-purpose data carrier.
That philosophical pivot has consequences far beyond technical policy. It introduces legal exposure, moral questions for node operators, and a very different set of incentives around blockspace.
Once the default policy changes at the reference client level, you can’t realistically mitigate the effect with local node policy alone. The coordination gravity of the default implementation is too strong. If the network wants to close that gap, the only durable path is tightening the rules at the consensus layer, because that’s where the highest level of network coordination actually happens.