Bitcoin may have just reached an all-time high, but a big fight has been brewing over whether to allow NFTs, memecoins or L2 capability on Bitcoin or to censor such transactions.
On Monday, bitcoin hit a new all-time high of over $126,000, but Bitcoin’s biggest fight right now isn’t about price; it’s about purpose.
Since 2023, image files and meme tokens have clogged the network, spiking fees and making everyday payments expensive. Bitcoin Core wants to lift an 80-byte data limit that's existed since 2014. Bitcoin Knots disagrees — and has built code to enforce a different limit. Should Bitcoin stay a payments network, or evolve into a platform that stores everything from NFTs to memecoins to experimental layer 2 protocols?
Blockstream CEO Adam Back and Bitcoin and Lightning developer Chris Guida debate whether removing limits on OP RETURN protects Bitcoin from what they call “spam,” or opens the floodgates to it.
Plus: the real lesson from 2014 when Vitalik Buterin left Bitcoin, why miners can bypass any filter by renting hash rate, and whether 22% of nodes running different code actually matters in a decentralized network.