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