Bitcoin Mechanic Hints at Collusion Between Bitcoin Core Developers and Citrea

The conflict surrounding the possible removal of the OP_RETURN spam guardrail in Bitcoin still rages on, with institutions pointing their fingers at Bitcoin Core developers for their behavior on the subject.

Global head of sales at Ocean Mining Bitcoin Mechanic, pseudonymously known for his activities in the crypto sphere, has continued to highlight what he believes to be problematic behavior by Bitcoin Core developers.

In a recent post, Bitcoin Mechanic asserted that these developers were colluding with Citrea, a Bitcoin Zero Knowledge (ZK) expansion product, to facilitate the inclusion of so-called "spam" in the blockchain.

"Citrea *need* your mempool to tolerate their junk, and Core are determined to help them with that by forcibly removing one of your spam filters," Mechanic stated.

This assertion arose from the ongoing conflict surrounding the possibility of removing the OP_RETURN spam guardrail in Bitcoin. While institutions like Ocean, a mining pool company that has been advocating to keep "spam" out of the bitcoin blockchain, are keeping an eye on the changes, they might not necessarily reflect the majority opinion.

According to data from BestHashrate, in April, the number of bitcoin nodes using Knots, an alternative bitcoin core client that allows configuring spam prevention options, increased by 49%.

This increase in nodes running an implementation other than Bitcoin Core might be surprising, given the fact that throughout the previous year, the number of nodes running implementations other than Bitcoin Core had been steadily decreasing.

Despite this change, even with the addition of 49% more nodes running Knots, Bitcoin Core remains the most used bitcoin implementation, reaching 20,213 nodes, which represent 94.78% of the total reachable nodes in the network.

However, this new data from BestHashrate showcases the fact that a significant portion of the network's nodes are capable of making choices regarding preferred spam parameters and spam filtering options.

As previously reported by Bitcoin Magazine, in March, a group of Bitcoin Core developers, specifically Asim Asad and Beryl Lake, proposed a change to the bitcoin code that would remove the limit on the size of OP_RETURN payloads.

This change, which is intended to increase the financial viability of Citrea’s product, would shift “some of the costs from them to people trying to make financial transactions using bitcoin,” according to Mechanic.

However, Casa founder Jameson Lopp, an investor in Citrea, stated in a recent post that Citrea does not use or need large OP_RETURNs for its normal operations.

"Citrea’s bridge does not need larger OP_RETURNs to operate. In fact, it doesn’t even use OP_RETURNs for its regular operations," Lopp said.

Instead, Citrea’s use of OP_RETURN is limited to fraud challenges, which Lopp noted "will likely never even occur due to the slashing disincentives."

"The potential for abuse is also minimal since anyone abusing the system would be slashed and lose a large sum of bitcoin in the process (which is in addition to the Citrea team members also being slashed and potentially banned from the ecosystem)," Lopp added.

To fight spam, Lopp proposed increasing bitcoin adoption, promoting self-custody tools and making actors pay more for using the bitcoin blockspace.