Most criticisms of BIP110 come from people who don’t understand the history that made BIP110 necessary.
If your understanding of BIP110 is “people are trying to change Bitcoin” you’ve missed the entire argument.
Here’s the timeline as I understand it. Please comment if I missed anything or made any mistakes.
1/ Bitcoin originally had anti-spam protections.
Satoshi implemented the first spam filters, and suggested there were “other things we could do if necessary” when trying to prevent use of the blockchain for arbitrary data.
Developers unanimously agreed that data storage was discernable, undesirable and to be discouraged
2/ SegWit introduced discounted witness space.
This was so that UTXOs were more cheap to consume than create. It was deliberately not made too large as there were concerns about it being used for spam.
Meant for scaling.
People that would use it to store non-monetary data would still be limited by the existing spam filters.
3/ Taproot increased script flexibility and bypassed existing filters.
Meant for privacy and smart contracting.
Created new ways to embed arbitrary data that would be relayed by the entire network before being mined
4/ Developers discovered the loophole.
Large amounts of non-payment data could now be stored more efficiently than before.
5/ Ordinals, inscriptions, tokens, and data schemes appeared.
6/@LukeDashjr proposed fixes.
He argued the bug was understood and fixable - simply subject taproot spends that reveal large amounts of frivolous data to the existing limits that applied to data storage elsewhere.
Core declined to update the filters and fix the bug with taproot.
7/ A new philosophy emerged inside Core.
“If it’s valid at the protocol level, it cannot be spam.” A standard that does not exist on any other protocol.
This replaced Bitcoin’s traditional anti-spam posture.
8/ Financial interests formed around the loophole.
Companies, exchanges, token issuers, NFT projects, and infrastructure providers began profiting from non-payment usage.
9/ The longer it would remaine open, the weaker Bitcoin would become, on a cultural level and on a technical level due to massively decreasing its efficiency as a payment network
Businesses were created with the expectation of a passive network that would not defend itself.
Non Bitcoin users became invested in the schemes.
Economic interests formed around preserving them.
10/ Core then went from failing to fix the filters to intentionally removing them in Core 30.
This was presented as “neutrality”.
Instead it was active solitication of parasitic use cases. They had moved from ignoring/tolerating spam to accommodating it.
11/ Trust in Core governance began to erode.
The issue was no longer inscriptions.
The issue was now the need to redefine Bitcoin as a solely monetary network, not a permissionless file storage network as that would create problems for users very quickly.
This is when @BitcoinKnots became popular.
12/ BIP110 was proposed - written by @dathon_ohm
To restore Bitcoin’s original anti-spam posture.
Not a new direction, but a revival of a network hostile to non-monetary usage.
To summarize:
First the loophole was created..
Then people exploited it..
Then businesses formed around it..
Then the businesses corrupted the trusted developers in the space who are now being fired as the network drops their client.
Because of this, saying “large OP_RETURNs have always been consensus-valid” is completely disingenuous - a red herring at best.
