Bitcoin devs continue fight over ‘arbitrary’ data storage
Exhausted after years of ineffective attempts to prevent non-financial (“arbitrary”) storage on Bitcoin’s blockchain, developers are asking Bitcoin Core maintainers to pull a code change into production that would remove a data size limit. Acknowledging two years of failed attempts to limit arbitrary data storage that some consider spam, Peter Todd created a pull request (PR) number 32359 that would lift arbitrary limits on datacarrier outputs via Bitcoin’s “OP_Return” operation code. If Core maintainers pull the change into production via the main repository, Bitcoin node operators like miners would be able to publish more bytes of data via OP_Return outputs. According to Todd’s formalization of the proposal by Chaincode Labs’ Antoine Poinsot, for any developers who think the 83-byte limit on OP_Return’s scriptPubKey is silly, they should test the code changes and consider whether they agree with lifting the limit. Spam workarounds for years Although t...