I don’t really have a solid opinion, but I remember people talking about a hard fork because of the inscriptions, and it still hasn’t happened. I’m not ruling it out, but honestly, I think it’s kinda unlikely. Time will tell.

My understanding is that you could... but many people are saying that with op_return it will be different.

Even if someone selects their own mempool policy... the transactions/data itself is still being stored on the node after it's mined in blocks and those blocks are relayed.

So a hard fork is needed.

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bitcoin

After the Core/Knots Hard Fork... Which version will you run and why?

You mean you couldn’t put that info in before version 30?