“Dear Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin is and must remain resistant to censorship.” It is the promise, the battle and the line in the sand drawn this week like Leonidas, the host of the Ordinal show, weigh On unleashed spam wars, warning the Bitcoin nucleus:
“Any serious attempt by Bitcoin Core to strengthen the rules of politics or the censorship ordinals and the transactions of runes will be welcomed by a decisive action.”
Bitcoin Core: transactions censorship is a “dangerous precedent”
Leonidas maintains that the Bitcoin network has been designed to be neutral, without authorization and open to anyone wishing to pay competition fees. To censor the JPEG, the same chain experience under the guise of “spam” is to undermine what distinguishes Bitcoin: resistance to censorship in the base layer. He warns:
“There is no significant difference between the normalization of the censorship of JPEG or even transactions and normalize the censorship of certain monetary transactions by the nation states. Both would establish very dangerous precedents. ”
For all those who follow the SPAM 2025 wars, the Core debate against Knots is everywhere, and the node operators began to vote with their feet, calling for nodes for its aggressive anti-spam characteristics.
Knots’ share went from 69 knots at the beginning of 2024 to more than 4,200 in September 2025, now representing more than 18% of the accessible network, a dramatic demonstration of protest against the next version of the Core V30.
The stake is more than OP_return data limits here. It is a battle on the soul of Bitcoin: should the protocol remain a strictly monetary layer of settlement, or can it evolve to support innovative chain uses, as long as the transaction costs are paid?
Ordinal and runes perspective
According to Leonidas, the ecosystem of ordinals and runes resulted in more than half a billion fees, supporting minors and security, while “using bitcoin as money every day” apart from inherited stories. They were fed up pf being “Gaslit” by the supporters of nodes.
Minors are not seated either, he said. Many mining pools commanding more than half of the bitcoin hash rate have expressed private the desire to accept any valid consensual transaction as long as security and implementation are healthy. It is not only neutrality in the name; This is how the resilience of the protocol is carried out on the ground.
‘Standing with the degens’: the angle of shinobi
Few comments have captured the mood quite Bitcoin Core shinobi:
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“As delayed as I think everything they do is, I stand with the decans. I will not participate or participate while a heap of Moralizing Puritan clowns will try to undermine the thing that bitcoin exists: a system resistant to censorship. ”
It is gross, it is frustrated, and it echoes a broader feeling among those who think differently of the nodes: resistance to any transaction censorship is not negotiable, that the threat is Jpeg, samecoins or monetary conflicts of the nation state.
Tensions continue to boil on X and NOSTR, with minors, knot operators and developers locked up in animated debates on almost all the technical details of the OP_return caps to what constitutes a “spam”.
The growth of nodes meteoric nodes has made fragmentation and chain divisions more than theoretical. As a Bitcoin Peter Tood core developer commented::
“It has become uncontrollable that the crowd of nodes becomes a serious risk for Bitcoin.”
If the adoption continues, the nodes could reach 23% of the network by October, which releases a tilting point for consensus. Leonidas’ message and many other degrees this week is clear:
“We will not remain dotted while the censorship of transactions is standardized on Bitcoin. We will defend the principles that have always distinguished Bitcoin, such as open access, resistance to censorship and neutrality at the base layer ”.
To the guards of Bitcoin Core: Bitcoin is and must remain resistant to censorship. Nothing less betrayed the very thing that the first digital currency of the world was built to oppose.
