🚁 Bitcoin's mission

This week on Supply Shock, Pete Rizzo hosts Pierre Rochard (Bitcoin Bond Company; Strive audit chair; co-founder, Nakamoto Institute) for a sharpened take on spam, OP_RETURN and Bitcoin’s mission.

Rochard argues Bitcoin should explicitly favor monetary use. Making non-monetary activity more expensive is a feature, not a bug.

So, he’d actually go further than the newly-released Core v30 and remove OP_RETURN entirely, then cap Taproot input sizes via consensus to raise the cost of spam. 

He rejects Core’s “harm-reduction” approach of enlarging the OP_RETURN relay limit, calling it an incentive mismatch that makes spamming easier.

Mempool policy won’t settle this, Rochard says: Liberal relays can route around filters, so the real venue is consensus rules. Practically, he doubts there’s support today for such a soft fork — the cost of spam is diffuse and politics muddy the waters — but he still sees that as the correct engineering direction.

“I don't think that there's real pressure on the developers today to go try to push this soft fork through, signaling with miners,” Rochard said. “I’m very skeptical that we would have enough miners on board with getting rid of OP_RETURN.”

On Core vs. Knots, Rochard expects no chain split. If anything, a few people may “rage-quit,” but he backs Core’s overall code quality and rejects culture-war caricatures.

Full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

This newsletter was created with assistance from AI tooling.

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