I think you are confusing consensus with policy. Each node can decide whether a block is valid. Each miner, or rather block template provider, decides what is placed into a block. What do you think the mempool is for?

Big miners have been and are going to do this anyway regardless of what nodes want, because nodes already accept much larger OP_RETURN sizes in mined blocks ... nodes already accept much larger OP_RETURN sizes in *mined blocks* ... This change *is not* about changing about what nodes accept in blocks (consensus) It's changing what nodes gossip about pre-block It's saying that if nodes ignored the gossip, then folks will just tell the miners directly at a higher cost that they are so far happy to pay (shitcoin economics, see BRC20 vs. Runes) "Core" is saying that pretending to not listen to gossip when you're going to accept the block anyway does not meaningfully stop spam, but it does affect miner centralization Ironically, the only thing "Core" is forcing is a change that would actually hurt miners by reducing preferential miner fees and opportunities for miner centralization through degraded block relay Ironically, the thing they are forcing is better for decentralization (accurate mempools, predictable fee estimates, less miner centralization pressure) ____ These are the arguments as I understand them so far, but I do agree that communication was handled poorly and that they should never the option to configure in and not force a single setting on nodes But I also agree that the default should help decentralization and network health. So I agree that raising the default size of OP_RETURNs that nodes *gossip* about with an option to configure is good, given that there is already a much larger limit nodes will already accept in mined blocks today None of these are consensus changes that can result in any sort of fork though. Nothing here changes what a valid mined transaction is. So comparisons to blocksize war don't really make sense to me because it's not the same game theory at all

The block size war clarified the existing nature of the system, which is that miners can't unilaterally decide on a softfork against the wishes of nodes used by economic actors. This was just a fact that we learned, and not some agreement that was reached saying miners must obey people's wishes. In this current drama, miners are already mining large OP_RETURNs, and we are not debating a consensus change. We know that miners will continue to mine large OP_RETURNs regardless of what some nodes will relay. Miners do not, and will not, obey your node. Bitcoin forces actors to face harsh technical realities, and people who harbor idealistic fantasies are forced to abandon them. You can hold on to them for a while, at the expense of decentralization through mempool fragmentation and private mempools favoring the largest miners. I wish you wouldn't, but in a while, you won't.

Well said! More and more coming to this view too.