What fundamental change? It’s literally returning Bitcoin to a state it was in 2022. The whole BIP is 70 lines of code.

Why not seek social consensus then if it’s not urgent? Plenty of time to do that since 2021, but now it’s this two weeks to stop the spread energy which the majority of Bitcoiners dislike. BIP-110 has noble goals of stopping spam but unfortunately it failed in its execution.

50% of all blockspace in the last 3 years is already filled with non-monetary data. Operating a node has become much harder and more expensive. The purpose of Bitcoin has been diluted to the point its own users don’t know if it’s money or general purpose blockchain. Each moment we waste there’s a chance a toxic content gets uploaded forever but this time as supported and sanctioned use, not as a hack. The change is not rushed, you could say it comes late.

It feels like it's been a really long time. How long did it take last time?

Bitcoin’s “purpose” is to be neutral, if a neutral protocol can even be assigned a purpose. BIP-110 introduces consensus-level content-policing breaking this neutrality. Even the BIP-110 version can be spammed with the toxic content so I don’t understand where the tradeoffs to support BIP-110 in its current form can be somehow switched to positive. If node running is a concern, better focus on UTXO optimization or better pruning defaults instead of creating precedents that break Bitcoin’s neutrality. Knots emerging as an alternative major client was great. Would have loved to see it reaching 50% of the nodes. That would have been “sending a signal” and building more social consensus for its goals. But BIP-110 alienates the potential Knots converts unfortunately.