Jeff/Luke Jr

I understand the points you are making about the OP_Return issue, but I think you are phrasing your arguments in an non conciliatory manner.  I think its fine if a decision is not made to increase OP_RETURN to 80 bytes, however I think some of the arguments made against this are inappropriate and analyse Bitcoin in too much of a narrow way.

A core advantage of Bitcoin is that clients accept transactions as long as it meets the requirements, nothing more, nothing less.  All transactions, whoever sent them, whatever the purpose, once in a block are treated equal.  It doesn't matter if the data in the transaction is a genuine financial transaction, a political message about a Times newspaper headline in 2009, a Christian prayer, a hash of a document being used as a notary service or anything else.  If this principal is lost, Bitcoin is weaker, less useful, less flexible and less likely to succeed.  What Bitcoin allows is innovation without permission and new alternative uses that nobody has even thought of yet.  This could go far beyond just financial transactions.

I understand many are concerned about the data storage requirements of those running full nodes and network capacity issues.  This is of course a genuine problem.  However I think its wrong to think that some data is more important than other data or has more of a right to be in the blockchain.  Some new protocols may have alternative implementation methods that take up less data in the blockchain.  If possible, lets try to implement these protocols in this way.  However ultimately, Bitcoin needs to be free and open and all users and protocol developers have the right to be able to use Bitcoin in whichever way they wish.  When kindly asking people to modify their protocols to take up less space, we should recognize this principal.

Many thanks