As reported, the Bitcoin Core project announced that new core release v30.0 is available for testing.
The Bitcoin Core v30 update, however, did not sit well with some members of the Bitcoin community, including Bitcoin pioneer Nick Szabo, who recommended not upgrading to the Bitcoin Core release.
“As a (hopefully) temporary measure, run Knots. I strongly recommend not upgrading to Core v30,” Szabo wrote. A few other Bitcoin community members also disagreed with the recent Core release.
The bone of contention in the Bitcoin v 30.0 release is an increase in OP_RETURN beyond the limit of 80 bytes.
As seen in the testing guide of the Bitcoin v30.0 release candidate, the upgrade increases “datacarriersize” to 100,000 by default, and to test this, one of the steps is for users to generate a new transaction with an OP_RETURN of greater than 83.
Bitcoin pioneer and Blockstream CEO Adam Back weighs in as the recent Bitcoin upgrade splits the community. Back made an important clarification about “OP_RETURN,” which is the main bone of contention.
To clarify, OP_Return is a special data storage function in a blockchain transaction.
While it is commonly believed that Bitcoin Core client version 0.9.0 introduced the OP_Return function to allow users to attach additional information to Bitcoin transactions, Back stated that “OP_RETURN” was a Satoshi feature, dating back to 15 years ago.
“Op return is old 15 years. It’s a Satoshi feature,” Back stated in a tweet.
While the Bitcoin Core v30 update includes TRUC transaction support, among others, the fact that it removes a limit on transaction data, increasing it to 100,000 bytes, as well as the OP_Return limit of 80 bytes, might not sit well with some members of the community.
