Bitcoin Core vs Knots: Why Developers Are Fighting Over a Coming Change - Ep. 918

On Monday, bitcoin hit a new all-time high of over $126,000, but Bitcoin’s biggest fight right now isn’t about price; it’s about purpose. 

Since 2023, image files and meme tokens have clogged the network, spiking fees and making everyday payments expensive. Bitcoin Core wants to lift an 80-byte data limit that's existed since 2014. Bitcoin Knots disagrees — and has built code to enforce a different limit. Should Bitcoin stay a payments network, or evolve into a platform that stores everything from NFTs to memecoins to experimental layer 2 protocols?

Blockstream CEO Adam Back and Bitcoin and Lightning developer Chris Guida debate whether removing limits on OP_RETURN protects Bitcoin from what they call “spam,” or opens the floodgates to it.

Plus: the real lesson from 2014 when Vitalik Buterin left Bitcoin, why miners can bypass any filter by renting hash rate, and whether 22% of nodes running different code actually matters in a decentralized network.

Thank you to our sponsors!

• Mantle

• Aptos

Guests:

• Chris Guida, Bitcoin and Lightning Ecosystem dev and Educator

• Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream

Timestamps: 🎬 0:00 Intro ⚙️ 1:37 What the Core vs. Knots debate is really about 🧩 4:46 Why “spam” filtering and “censorship” aren’t the same 💾 7:28 How NFTs, ordinals, and BRC-20s created the “spam” problem 🧱 8:51 The Genesis block message vs. today’s onchain data 🔍 13:27 What op_return does and why its size limit matters ⚔️ 22:04 Why the proposed change has split the Bitcoin community 📈 26:25 Can Bitcoin stay censorship-resistant while filtering “spam”? 💣 30:26 Do economic incentives make “spam” filters useless? 🧰 34:17 Why some believe filters still work to protect blockspace 💰 36:05 Would higher fees from non-payment data help miners secure Bitcoin? 🧮 42:06 Does more data make it harder to run a node? 🧭 46:04 Can Bitcoin fight storage data without hurting its core principles? ⚡ 50:37 What counts as a “real” layer 2 on Bitcoin 🧱 55:55 How much support the Knots software actually has 🧩 1:00:35 Could this debate cause a Bitcoin chain split? 🔚 1:04:22 Closing thoughts on what’s next for the network

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices