After private assaults and drama throughout this month’s OP_RETURN struggle over non-financial information storage on Bitcoin’s blockchain, senior Bitcoin Core maintainer Gloria Zhao has deleted her X account.
Within the phrases of the developer accountable for the OP_RETURN proposal that began the struggle in April, Chaincode Labs’ Antoine Poinsot, the proposal was “heavily mediatized” and inflicted “a lot of wasted time to everybody.”
It additionally erased some of the well-liked builders from Bitcoin’s most lively social media community.
Within the days main as much as her X resignation, Zhao had grow to be a vocal proponent for lifting OP_RETURN’s mempool datacarrier relay restrict from 83 to tons of of hundreds of bytes. In essence, the change would have accommodated extra non-financial information on Bitcoin’s ledger, like images, video games, third-party code, and enterprise information.
Her reasoning, like a lot of her Chaincode Labs and Brink colleagues, was that the restrict was antiquated and basically pointless due to different information storage elsewhere.
She felt Bitcoin Core node software program, by default, ought to settle for and relay any giant OP_RETURN outputs throughout its mempool queue of pending transactions.
That manner, node operators would have a greater view of charges and the transactions almost definitely to affix Bitcoin’s subsequent block.
Conserving Bitcoin’s chain for BTC transactions
Though Zhao loved loads of assist from her facet of the controversy, she additionally acquired an equal quantity of adverse suggestions from the opposition.
Defending OP_RETURN’s 83-byte restrict is a big and rising variety of conservative Bitcoin node operators who see no purpose to ease storage for non-bitcoin (BTC) information. They name the images and third-party information stuffed into OP_RETURN outputs “spam.”
Lifting the 83-byte cap would solely encourage extra spam, conservatives argued, and arguments about modernization or harmonization of OP_RETURN with different information storage choices by individuals like Zhao have been unpersuasive.
Even imperfect limits can function deterrents, they argued.
Of their view, the job of Bitcoin Core is to protect a reference consumer for node operators to validate BTC transactions — not function a distributed database akin to cloud storage.
In any case, Zhao was on the facet of easing OP_RETURN’s datacarrier restrict. That made her eminently unpopular along with her conservative opposition, together with one in all its leaders, BitcoinMechanic.
Gloria Zhao waves goodbye to OP_RETURN drama
In a livestream on April 29, BitcoinMechanic bemoaned builders like Zhao and others who argued for the extra progressive software program default. At one level, he even attacked her credentials and credited her romantic relationship with one other senior developer as a serious purpose she loved GitHub code commit entry.
Retellings of that clip went viral on X because the OP_RETURN struggle waged on. Quickly, in a basic phone game-like mutation, BitcoinMechanic’s accusation of a easy love curiosity morphed into an implication that Zhao had “slept with someone to get her job.”
Though BitcoinMechanic by no means made that specific accusation, many individuals attacked him for the insinuation.
Zhao additionally acquired more moderen, adverse consideration after critics identified her function in wordplaying the definition of “deprecated” to serve her personal pursuits.
For no matter number of causes, Zhao has determined that her time on X has come to an finish. She additionally has deleted her whole historical past of tweets and replies.
