Bitcoin developers are again in odds of how the world’s oldest and largest blockchain should handle the storage of information on-chain, with a suggestion to relax long-term limits on the size of data that has the one that triggers hard debate reminiscent of 2023’s matches on ordinals.

Blockchains Op_return feature allows people to attach a small piece of extra data to a transaction, as is often used for things like notes, timing or digital items. The proposed change made by developer Peter Todd would remove the 80-byte cap on such data, a limit that was originally designed to deter spam and preserve Blockchain’s financial integrity.

Supporters claim that the current limit is meaningless because users are already bypassing it by using taproot transactions to hide data within parts of the transaction intended for cryptographic signatures. This is how ordinals and inscriptions work (and why they have their critics): They embed images or text in taproot transactions that are often unexplained, making Bitcoin Blockchain a kind of data storage system.

Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr, a vocal critic of ordinals, whom he has long felt a “spam attack” on blockchain, called the proposal “completely insanity” and warned that the solution of data limits would accelerate what he sees as a degradation of Bitcoin’s economic-first purpose.

“It should be unnecessary to say, but this idea is completely insane,” Posted Dashjr. “Bugs must be corrected, not the abuse that is embraced.”

Critics of the proposal also have another concern. The change can normalize illegal content storage, detract from the chain’s fungalability and transform knob people into ignorant hosts of malware and copyright offenses.

To demonstrate the potential Maelstrom this can cause, an ordinal -team -team enrolled a whole Nintendo 64 emulator on Blockchain, which can get the attention of Nintendo, a company known to be protective of its intellectual property.

Supporters of the change, including Pieter Wuille and SJORS Provoost, claimed that relaxing up_return borders can actually reduce what is known as UTXO (unspent transaction production), and a phenomenon that slows Blockchain when the network becomes messy with non-financial transaction and mempool fragmentation.

Utxo -Breathing is a documented side effect of ordinals and inscriptions using taproot transactions. For example, in May 2023, at the height of Ordinal’s popularity, Bitcoin Blockchain was then overloaded Binance had to suspend Bitcoin (BTC) withdrawals for a number of hours.

“Demand exists,” Wuille wrote. “And push it outside the public relay network causes only major damage.”

Currently, the proposal remains during review. One thing is for sure: the intensity of the debate on GitHub and Blockchain developer -mailing lists shows that the battle for Bitcoin’s identity is far from over.