Bitcoiners are right to be concerned

Bitcoin is bigger than the knots vs core debate. Regardless of your viewpoint on the benefits and downsides of either, one thing we must agree on is that bitcoin must remain unstoppable. You think Wall Street and central banks have your best interests at heart?

Bitcoin has a massive market share, and since early 2024 has broken into mainstream finance, for better or for worse. Clearly the huge amounts of capital moving into bitcoin is good for price, everyone wants to see that go up. Especially as the fiat economy is rapidly going down the toilet, bitcoin is a wise choice to hold.

But the increased interest in bitcoin has catapulted it into the conversations of bankers, central bankers and governments across the globe.

Mining has also become an industrial occupation, and pools are narrowed down to the big players. You can argue the benefits and negatives of these facts, but that's for another article.

In light of that, I sense complacency in the current thought process surrounding core v30 and knots. Both sides appear to be thinking of the short/medium term, and not of the long term consequences to the network.

knots

Besides the mash of insults and contradictory nature of X posts (on both sides), knots has a valid point in that removing the limit on OP_RETURN potentially opens bitcoin up to abuse from a hostile government wanting an excuse to ban bitcoin.

Enabling large amounts of arbitrary data that is hosted on people’s hardware is NOT smart in my opinion. 

BUT at the same time, knots also sounds to me exactly like what governments are currently trying to do to encryption: add a backdoor/filter to stop unwanted content. "Unwanted" of course being completely subjective.

In the case of CSAM, which is one of their arguments, it makes some sense, but you can't break the door open for one cause and expect it to not backfire and be abused by another. 

If you open the door to that, that makes it WAY easier for a hostile government to do the same again for a different purpose, since you opened a precedent. Same as if you broke an encryption standard to stop a terrorist spreading beheadings on the internet, at the end of the day you weakened the entire system for everyone. 

Core v30

From what I understand from Adam Back, his main argument is to protect bitcoin's censorship free network, not censoring what is on the network itself, since that is by definition a network that cannot be censored. Having spam on the network is a side effect of having a censorship free network, just like having CSAM on the internet is a side effect of encryption standards.

Does that mean we should break all encryption just to stop a few minority bad actors? In my opinion, HELL NO.

The internet is used to secure everything from emails, to banking, to private communications etc. Crack that open and you change the entire world economy and jeopardize basic human safety.

The fact is, adding filters would simply speed up and make easier any hostile attempt to censor bitcoin as a network - not what’s actually stored on it. The content would simply be the excuse to take down nodes, pools, miners, etc. 

So yes I believe that there is sense to Adams argument, as his view is to protect the long term unstoppable nature of bitcoin. However, why on earth is he arguing for raising the OP_RETURN limit? This to me is contradictory to his main argument, as it opens up a whole new kettle of fish.

Is it motivated by keeping mining profitable in the long term by enabling higher fees? Maybe. I don't see any other valid reasons to raise the limit. There are plenty of other networks for sending jpegs and data on.

the contradiction

Maybe there is more to it that I'm not aware of, but I would argue that both v30 and knots are detrimental to bitcoin in the long term, and both ignore the potential risks. To me, bitcoin seems to work just fine as it is.

Regarding the debates, most of the conversations don't zoom out enough, if a hostile government/s wanted to attack bitcoin, it's the nodes they would target. Mining is by design resistant to any government takeover, bitcoin still works even if there are only three CPUs mining it.

But node operators are vulnerable. If you give states or bad actors an excuse to seize them, they will, just like 'protecting kids' is the pretext for chat control to destroy privacy.

Currently no government has any incentive to do so, but when the banks all crash and cash is worthless it might be a different story. Banks could lobby the government to take control of, or stop bitcoin to save their asses. If in the meantime they manage to break privacy as much as possible and add hidden pretexts, it makes it easier when they do want to do something.

the bigger threat

Many bitcoiners are self proclaimed anarcho-capitalists or libertarians, so how do they think that will work out if there is a war on bitcoin by failing states and banks?

We need to future proof it, not mess around with potentially disastrous filters or no-filters.

Looking further ahead, how can bitcoin remain unstoppable if multiple states or the banking cartels realize it threatens their existence?

Many assume that because banks and governments are now considering or actively adding bitcoin to their reserves, and that there is so much money in it that that means bitcoin is 'safe'.

I strongly argue the opposite: don't be so naïve. They do not have your best interests at heart. They are in survival mode and scooping up bitcoin so it can be abused later.

no winners

So is either side of the knots or core debate right? I have yet to see any good arguments as to why the OP-RETURN limit should be raised, it opens a door that could be abused later, but the argument for adding censorship inside the network is just plain dangerous.

Does it make me pessimistic about bitcoins' future? Absolutely not. I believe these are healthy topics to be discussing and that it will lead to greater realization of what bitcoin was originally designed for.

The future is orange.