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@ asyncmind
2025-05-17 13:03:45
Here’s a short speculative history of a timeline where Bitcoin Core removed OP_RETURN:
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The Great Commit – 2026
In 2026, a controversial PR titled Remove OP_RETURN Output Support is quietly merged into Bitcoin Core’s master branch after a brief discussion dominated by a few long-time maintainers. The stated goal: “Reduce spam, simplify mempool policy, and align with Bitcoin’s use as money.”
No BIP. No community consensus. No warning.
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Immediate Fallout
Projects Broken Overnight:
Timestamping services like OpenTimestamps, notary platforms, and token protocols relying on OP_RETURN fail to broadcast transactions.
Public Outrage:
Small devs and sovereign builders decry the "soft fork by policy." Twitter (now Zeta) explodes. “Bitcoin is ossifying into gold 2.0,” cry critics.
Fork Threats:
Counterparty and Omni communities threaten to fork Core. A new client, Satoshi Unlimited, emerges, restoring OP_RETURN and mocking the change with a FREE_RETURN opcode.
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Institutional Silence
Big exchanges and custodians quietly adapt.
Most don’t use OP_RETURN anyway.
They welcome a “cleaner” mempool.
The Bitcoin dev mailing list is flooded with philosophical debates about whether Bitcoin is a "monetary protocol" or "programmable truth machine."
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The Hard Split – 2027
After a year of mounting frustration, the Open Bitcoin Protocol Alliance (OBPA) forks Bitcoin Core to preserve extensibility. Their chain—Bitcoin Truth (BTT)—gains traction with builders, timestampers, and DAOs. Its motto: Don’t Censor the Script.
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2029 and Beyond
Bitcoin Core (BTC):
Institutional, minimal, slow-changing, purely monetary.
Bitcoin Truth (BTT):
Developer-driven, extensible, and interoperable with Bitcoin L2s.
A decade later, people speak of 2026 as the year Bitcoin lost the soul of Satoshi, and a new schism rewrote the future.
#bitcoin