{"id":46430,"date":"2025-09-09T02:01:34","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T02:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=46430"},"modified":"2025-09-09T02:01:34","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T02:01:34","slug":"bitcoin-core-censorship-could-trigger-full-scale-fork-ordinals-leader-warns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=46430","title":{"rendered":"Bitcoin Core Censorship Could Trigger Full-Scale Fork, Ordinals Leader Warns"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

A leading figure in the Bitcoin Ordinals movement has threatened to bankroll an alternative version of the reference Bitcoin software if Bitcoin Core tightens default relay policy to the detriment of Ordinals and Runes transactions. In an \u201copen letter to Bitcoin Core\u201d posted on September 6, Leonidas \u2014 host of The Ordinal Show and a prominent organizer in the inscriptions ecosystem \u2014 warned that \u201cany serious attempt by Bitcoin Core to tighten policy rules or censor Ordinals and Runes transactions will be met with decisive action.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said<\/a> that, if necessary, \u201cthe DOG Army will fund the development and maintenance of an open source fork of Bitcoin Core that strips out nearly all policy rules,\u201d adding that thousands would run it \u201cto make it abundantly clear that Bitcoin is and must always remain censorship resistant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leonidas framed the dispute as one over the base-layer neutrality. He argued that the Ordinals\/Runes economy is not freeloading, claiming it has \u201ccontributed over half a billion dollars in transaction fees to strengthen Bitcoin\u2019s security,\u201d and asserted he has spoken \u201cdirectly with miners and mining pools representing more than 50% of Bitcoin\u2019s total hash rate,\u201d who, he said, will accept any consensus-valid transactions with competitive fees if the process is straightforward.<\/p>\n

Bitcoin Core Vs. Knots<\/h2>\n

The post lands amid intensifying debate over mempool policy vs. consensus and ahead of Bitcoin Core\u2019s next major release<\/a>. The pushback from \u201cmonetary-maximalist\u201d voices has been equally blunt.<\/p>\n

Blockstream CEO Adam Back<\/a> reiterated that \u201cBitcoin is owned by humanity, the protocol developers are stewards, and need consensus from users to change it materially,\u201d adding that \u201cbitcoin is about money, spam has no place in the timechain,\u201d and that the Core client\u2019s defaults therefore matter. In parallel comments, Back has questioned whether peer-to-peer filters even work in practice to curb the activity inscriptions critics call \u201cspam.\u201d<\/p>\n

Luke Dashjr, maintainer of the Knots implementation and a lead advocate of stricter default policy<\/a>, insists the posture is not censorship. \u201cNo, filters are not censorship,\u201d he wrote in a fresh exchange \u2014 a line consistent with his years-long position that nodes may, and often should, apply relay filters, while miners remain free to include any consensus-valid transaction that pays sufficient fees. Dashjr has continued to argue for stronger default limits and has encouraged operators who prefer stricter policy to run Knots.<\/p>\n

\n

Bitcoin is not a finished product. We may be on a detour to address spam, and part of the crisis did originate with (mishandling of) the Segwit and Taproot upgrades \u2013 but to improve the world, we still need more functionality. Stopping all improvements forever (\u201cossifying\u201d) is\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2014 Luke Dashjr (@LukeDashjr) September 8, 2025<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At the center of the dispute is Bitcoin Core v30, scheduled for October, and specifically a set of policy changes merged in June that widen the \u201cstandardness\u201d aperture for data-carrying transactions.<\/p>\n

Core v30 will remove the long-standing default 80-byte cap on OP_RETURN payloads (making the effective cap the block size limit) and, crucially, will begin relaying transactions with multiple OP_RETURN outputs by default \u2014 changes to mempool relay policy, not to consensus rules. Proponents say aligning policy with what miners actually include improves fee estimation, reduces reliance on out-of-band submission, and corrects perverse incentives that pushed data into the UTXO set; critics see it as normalizing non-monetary use of block space.<\/p>\n

Core developers have publicly articulated where they draw the line. In a June 6 statement, signatories including Pieter Wuille, Gloria Zhao, Greg Sanders and others wrote that Core aims to \u201cmake our software work as efficiently and reliably as possible\u201d for validating and relaying transactions and blocks, and that transaction-relay policy should not \u201cblock \u2026 transactions that have sustained economic demand and reliably make it into blocks.\u201d<\/p>\n

They warned that knowingly refusing to relay such transactions pushes users into alternative submission channels and undermines decentralization \u2014 while stressing this is not an endorsement of non-financial data, merely an acceptance that a censorship-resistant system will be used for things \u201cnot everyone agrees on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leonidas, for his part, rejected any normalization of content-based filtering: \u201cThere is no meaningful difference between normalizing the censorship of JPEG or memecoin transactions and normalizing the censorship of certain monetary transactions by nation-states. Both would set very dangerous precedents.\u201d He also claimed that \u201cover twenty Bitcoin startups that operate economically relevant nodes \u2026 would welcome the expanded design space\u201d if nodes were required only to follow consensus rules rather than \u201carbitrary policy restrictions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The governance backdrop matters. Bitcoin Core is not Bitcoin, and users choose which software to run \u2014 a point both sides invoke. In practical terms, the market is already voting with its node software: according to Coin.Dance, Knots has gained huge momentum and now accounts for 4,373 of 23,729 publicly reachable nodes \u2014 just over 18% \u2014 up sharply in recent months as the relay-policy fight has intensified.<\/p>\n

At press time, BTC traded at $112,009.<\/p>\n

\"Bitcoin<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A leading figure in the Bitcoin Ordinals movement has threatened to bankroll an alternative version of the reference Bitcoin software if Bitcoin Core tightens default relay policy to the detriment of Ordinals and Runes transactions. In an \u201copen letter to Bitcoin Core\u201d posted on September 6, Leonidas \u2014 host of The Ordinal Show and a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,4,5],"class_list":["post-46430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crypto","tag-doge","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46430\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}