I hope the mempool filtering people move forward with their filtering fork ASAP.
To be clear, I haven't explicitly heard of any "official" plans to initiate a hard fork, but I've spent enough time in Bitcoin to know a fork when I see one coming. It's got all the hallmarks:
- Highly vocal and aggressive subcommunity
- Beefing with core devs over reference client design choices
- Submitting BIP drafts to change consensus rules without due research or community buy-in
- Disingenuous/bad-faith behavior (e.g. Classifying inscriptions as a CVE so they could issue a "patch")
- Rallying against the core devs' so-called "centralized control" over bitcoin, leading to attempts to change the reference client repo's ownership structure
If i had the choice, I would prefer there to be no fork at all. I wish we could stop this nonsensical infighting today, but I'm pretty sure that won't happen. I don't see any future where Knotsers continue running passive mempool policy rules now that core has explicitly uncapped the default OP_RETURN policy limit. I also don't see any scenario where the dev community suddenly reverses course and implements BIP444 in
bitcoind. That leaves only one path.I want a fork ASAP because I think it's already a fait accompli. The sooner they fork and get it over with, the sooner we can all get this toxic conflict out of our minds, and can continue discussing & building the Bitcoin upgrades which truly matter: Expressibility (Covenants), scaling (CISA), post-quantum security (BIP360), and many more. We should be chasing the stars, pushing the edges of what's possible, not playing games with NFT grifters and their rage-baited adversaries.
It really pains me to see smart people distracted by BIP444 when they have so many better things they could be doing with their time. But nonetheless I am glad to see earnest reviews of these foolish proposals, because then at least others will be able to more easily grasp the inane hubris of trying to censor information on a distributed P2P network.
Just let them fork and get it over with homies. It'll be painful, divisive, toxic, and some people may lose money to replay attacks, but we've seen our fair share of these scenarios before and bitcoin has turned out just fine.