Bitcoin core developer Antoine Pointothot’s merged pull request over the years, the 80-byte OP_return relay cap sparked one of the most divisive member policy debates since the block size war.
With a quick escalation, another contributor has posted a public bash script to run all known nodes running all known nodes.
The script published on GitHub on May 24th will be set for one year setban Overall /Satoshi:Knots/ User Agent.
If widely adopted, it effectively separates around 3,000 publicly reachable nodes, according to Coin Dance’s latest 2,938 counts as of June 24th, erodes one of Bitcoin’s basic decentralisation metrics.
Unlike past conflicts over consensus rules, current conflicts are concentrated in relay policies. With Core’s V30 client scheduled to be released on October 3rd, operational splits can be achieved without a hard fork.
The Knot implementation has gained momentum since the core team consolidated changes to Poinsot’s Op_return policy on May 6th.
The share of reachable nodes doubled over the weeks of May and continued to climb until June, describing the removal of the cap as “complete insanity,” in line with voice criticism of the change from lead maintainer Luke Daschul.
Although Op_return is not critical of consensus, node-level policy decisions shape transaction propagation and Mempool filtering.
Bitcoin OP War
The origin of the conflict dates back to the original enforcement of Bitcoin Core in 2014 with the 80-byte OP_Return limit. Initially, a tool that enables data inscriptions such as notarized hash and token metadata, the OP_Return field became a spam vector during peak usage.
Recently, innovations such as ordinal numbers and BRC-20 tokens have been used to harness similar mechanisms to drive large amounts of expensive transactions into the chain. The October release schedule for Core V30 will remove the cap completely and can include a larger OP_Return payload when the transaction author pays the required fee.
Opponents see this shift as undermining the role of Bitcoin as a lean financial settlement. Samson Mow, CEO of JAN3 and frequently criticising data-heavy usage patterns, framing the issue as one that protects network integrity by urging users to “reject 29.0 or runknot upgrades and stays.”
Others, like Peter Todd, who wrote an earlier version of the same proposal in 2023, views deletion as a necessary simplification to adhere to market conditions and fee incentives.
The Op_return cap is enforced at the policy level, allowing node operators to adopt or reject changes individually. This dynamic increases the role of miners and relay infrastructure operators, and ultimately determine which transactions appear in the candidate block.
If the critical mass of the top pool is on the side with knots, blocks filled with larger op_return data cannot be propagated efficiently, and may create a de facto veto. Conversely, if Core defaults dominate, alternative policies can be siloed and economically irrelevant.
Key participants began trading personal accusations as the conflict moved to public channels like X. Poinsot. Poinsot has accused the public of “deliberately misleading” and “creating an S***” amid growing hostility towards technical issues, governance and norms of communication.
The broader meaning may extend to Bitcoin’s ability to respond to diverse policy views without dividing operational aggregation.
Differences in consensus with block-sized wars
Unlike the 2017 block size discussion, the OP_Return split does not require incompatible consensus rules. Still, the threat of split networks is looming, especially when coordinated peer bans are widespread. Block propagation across the two camps may remain functional, but transaction relay pathways can break and affect toll markets, data services, and blockchain analytics.
Bitcoin Core’s V30 client is scheduled to freeze on August 20th, with a branch off planned around September 6th, with a targeted final release tag scheduled for October 3rd, following the updated GitHub schedule. Major mining pools such as Foundry, Antpool, F2Pool, VIABTC and Binance Pool have not issued statements on relay policy settings and have kept them open whether V30 changes will propagate by default or face silent resistance.
Since May, the number of Bitcoin Knot nodes has continued to climb, reaching 2,938 as of June 24th, the highest of the record and accounting, with over 13% of reachable peers. The original ban script remains live, and at least one new tool, BTC-Magic-Guard, has emerged to provide IPTABLE-based filtering to isolate nodes running policy divert clients.
Meanwhile, the follow-up proposal to allow multiple OP_return outputs per transaction was recently withdrawn after a pushback, suggesting that it is unlikely that core maintainers will revisit or narrow down the policies that were merged before the V30 ship.
For now, the network remains unified under shared consensus rules, but unresolved differences in relay behavior, peer connections, and node policies have made soft partitions a concrete scenario ahead of the October release.
