The gloves are off in this year's revival of Bitcoin's 2010 OP_RETURN war.

input: The gloves are off in this year’s revival of Bitcoin’s 2010 OP_RETURN war.

Weeks into a heated impasse, the leader of the progressive movement seeking to ease data storage limits on Bitcoin Core mempools has dispensed with intellectual arguments, and underhanded rhetoric masquerading as a security warning has gone viral.

Antoine Poinsot of Chaincode Labs, the originator of pull request (PR) 32359 to increase OP_RETURN’s datacarrier limit from 83 to hundreds of thousands of bytes, blames his opponent as having “troubles with reality,” “intentionally misleading” with “lies,” and “actively making s*** up.”

Chaincode and similarly-minded Brink developers think that Bitcoin’s most popular queue of transactions should relay large OP_RETURN outputs that contain data irrelevant to the movement of BTC.

Meanwhile, conservatives find this accommodative policy preposterous, tantamount to a subversion of Bitcoin’s purpose by corporate interests.

Luke Dashjr, a leading conservative seeking to retain or even tighten OP_RETURN’s 83-byte filter in the OP_RETURN war, is also tired of pleasantries.

Dashjr is calling his opposition “spam apologists,” “corrupt,” “scammers,” and “bad actors.” He also blamed Poinsot for “gaslighting,” and accused a Bitcoin Core developer of intentionally hacking one of his code repositories.

Read more: Bitcoin nodes protesting OP_RETURN change hit all-time high

Bitcoin OP_RETURN conservatives turn on Knots nodes

In a signal of opposition, conservatives are downloading and syncing Knots full nodes to the Bitcoin network. As opposed to Bitcoin Core maintainers’ intention to raise the OP_RETURN datacarrier cap, Knots’ maintainer Dashjr intends to retain the cap.

Knots nodes have more than doubled in May. Indeed, by Sunday, Knots had rallied to an all-time high of 8.3% of public nodes.

In an attempt to discourage Knots operators, a thread about security vulnerabilities went viral over the weekend.

It highlighted Dashjr as its sole maintainer, his “terrible security track record,” and its similarity to Bitcoin Core — especially in accepting OP_RETURN transactions within valid blocks.

The thread, merely claiming that using Knots will “harm your fee estimation,” conveniently omitted the effectiveness of over 15 years of Bitcoin’s 83-byte-or-lower OP_RETURN datacarrier for Bitcoin Core’s default mempool.

Indeed, Bitcoin Core’s 83-byte limit on mempool relays has prevented OP_RETURN outputs exceeding 83 bytes from 99% of all mined transactions since Bitcoin’s creation.

Got a tip? Send us an email securely via Protos Leaks. For more informed news, follow us on X, Bluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.output: As the leader of the progressive movement to increase data storage limits on Bitcoin Core mempools, Poinsot has grown increasingly frustrated with the resistance he has encountered.

After weeks of a heated impasse, Poinsot appears to have lost patience with making intellectual arguments. Instead, he has focused on poking fun at his opponent’s demeanor and priorities.

Poinsot, a member of Brink, a non-profit focused on advancing Bitcoin development, is the maintainer of the pull request (PR) to increase OP_RETURN’s datacarrier. The PR started as a proposal to add a new data carrier to Bitcoin Core’s mempool, but it was later amended to remove the addition and simply increase the existing limit from 83 to 320,000 bytes.

The move was made in response to a proposal by Luke Dashjr, the sole maintainer of the alternative Bitcoin client Knots, to decrease the datacarrier limit even further, to zero.

Dashjr, a well-known figure in the Bitcoin community, is a former mentee of the cryptocurrency’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

output: Poinsot’s PR to increase the datacarrier limit was met with opposition from some members of the Bitcoin community, who argued that it would open the door to spam and that it was not in the best interests of Bitcoin.

Among the most vocal critics was Dashjr, who has been a staunch opponent of any move to increase the datacarrier limit.

In a recent post on the Bitcoin Core development forum, Poinsot appeared to lose his temper with his opponent, accusing him of having “no clue what he is talking about,” of “intentionally misleading” people with “lies,” and of “actively making s*** up.”

“He has troubles with reality,” Poinsot wrote. “He is scamming people.”

The post began with Poinsot lamenting that despite a "light-hearted attempt" at reconciliation, Dashjr "had other plans