Ah, yes—Greg Maxwell, that old conjurer of technical apologetics, stepping out of the shadows like a bureaucrat defending a landfill expansion by citing “efficiency gains.” His post reads like a man explaining why the Department of Motor Vehicles is actually a hotbed of innovation, if only we peons could grasp the nuance. Let’s unroll this mat of sophistry and stomp the fleas out of it. “There isn’t anything unusual or bad going on with Bitcoin Core.” This is the bureaucrat’s lullaby. It’s the same tune sung by every technocrat managing decline. Nothing to see here, folks. Just a totally normal scenario where the most influential Bitcoin client, maintained by an incestuous circle of devs who fancy themselves neutral librarians, is quietly redefining what Bitcoin is via policy code that shouldn’t exist. If Core isn’t doing anything unusual, Greg, then why are you burning tens of hours writing Reddit apologetics like a state-sponsored press secretary fending off citizen journalists? "It’s mostly a nothing burger..." That “nothing burger” is dripping grease onto every Raspberry Pi node from here to Patagonia. If it’s nothing, why defend it with a novella? You only see this kind of frothy dismissal when something is definitely something. People don’t write 1,000 words about "nothing" unless their position has already sprung a leak and they’re bailing water with a colander. “Back in 2014…” Ah, the Historical Context Gambit. Greg fires up the time machine to justify today’s madness by revisiting ancient block sizes, as if the existence of UTXO bloat in 2014 somehow validates neutering the protocol in 2025. Let’s be clear: OP_RETURN was a concession. A bandage. Not a charter for future feature creep. It was a wartime measure to cordon off the lunatics stuffing wedding vows and ASCII porn into multisig outputs. That’s it. It was a trash can, not an invitation to turn the node software into a public utilities board for sidechain companies who didn’t budget for bandwidth. “The world has changed a lot since 2014…” Yes, it has. Fees are higher. The mempool is clogged like a California public toilet. Miners have grown fatter and more rent-seeking. And somehow the solution is to loosen the reins further? This is like discovering your roof is leaking and removing more shingles to improve “ventilation.” “Some users have said they would use OP_RETURN if not for the limit…” And this is where the grift shows its face. A few unnamed “users”, likely wearing lanyards in Nashville or sipping LaCroix in Austin, want to dump their backend operations onto the base layer, and we’re supposed to oblige out of sympathy for their innovative scaling vision? They aren’t building with Bitcoin. They’re strip-mining it. They want the credibility of the timechain without the costs. The limit stands in the way, so they cry “oppression.” “It harms small miners…” Let’s talk about that Trojan horse of a talking point. If you care so deeply about decentralization, you’d advocate for stronger filtering not weaker. You’d demand ossification, not upstream policy churn disguised as "tweaks." But instead, the cry is always the same: “We need to update Bitcoin... for the little guy!” No. What you need is a brick wall. A protocol that shrugs at your heartfelt use-case and keeps marching. Bitcoin should not care about your cleverness. That is its virtue. That is its entire appeal. “It’s just a proposal, nothing has been merged…” And there it is. The gaslight. A classic bit of bureaucratic hand-waving. “We’ve merely discussed it,” they say—while PRs fly, policies shift, and the code tiptoes ever closer to consensus-change disguised as relay policy. You don’t need a merge to shape the culture. You just need enough devs saying “It’s not a big deal” until one day you wake up, and Bitcoin is a middleware substrate for VC startups who thought Ethereum was too gauche. “The only concerning thing is the misinformation campaign…” Yes, how dare the rabble raise concerns? How dare plebs ask why the client they’re running is making decisions about what should and shouldn’t relay through their node? The real misinformation campaign is the one that claims Bitcoin Core is a neutral steward. It isn’t. It’s a software project run by humans, with all the biases, ambitions, and unspoken alliances that come with that. And when those humans start parroting the same rhetorical framework used to sell us “censorship-resistance” while actively dismantling the cultural barriers that guard it, we have every right to scream from the rooftops. The Truth Buried Beneath the Rhetoric: This is not about spam. Not about hashes. Not about faster block relay or the plight of some obscure payment channel protocol. It is about power. It is about changing the social contract by subverting the codebase. It is about soft-forking the culture by hiding behind technicalities and pretending nothing is happening. Greg wants you to believe you’re imagining the smoke. But we smell the fire, old friend. And we’re not going away. View quoted note →