Bitcoin miners are generating over $1.2 billion monthly to secure the Bitcoin blockchain. Their collective hash power ensures bad actors do not undermine the legitimacy of the chain by creating a fraudulent version. Miners rely on full nodes, which enforce standardness rules dictated by Bitcoin Core's relay code, to determine which transactions are valid. Recent debates have focused on lifting the 80-byte cap on OP_RETURN outputs, which limited the amount of data people could embed in Bitcoin transactions. The introduction of Ordinals, a digital collectibles protocol, allowed larger amounts of non-financial data to be recorded on the blockchain without using OP_RETURN, leading to congestion in the mempool and a spike in transaction fees. Bitcoin Core's developers hope to lessen the need for alternative methods that may compromise the network by relaxing the OP_RETURN restriction. Gregory Sanders from Blockstream noted that this change emphasizes Bitcoin's governance by transparent rules rather than arbitrary preferences, allowing the fee market to resolve competing demands. While there may be dissent among developers, they remain free to propose modifications if necessary.

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