As I posted in another related threads, I have however some reservations against the "total liberation" of the OP_RETURN limit in one single step. It is the easiest way to make that move and it seems to have been already decided, but as this discussion was very politized and generated a lot of drama, I am worried of some potential "revenge attack" once Core 30 gets published
Already now and before any discussion started a very significant portion of hashpower had already removed the limit completely. Which means anyone can just already embed whatever, the only reason your attacker would delay is because they're trying to contribute to a false and malicious attack that their action was somehow enabled by the newer software when the reality is that they can just do it right now. I don't mean via inscriptions (which, of course, also works), but just via op_return.
This is the product of having limits that are actively irrational for miners to impose, they'll go dig them out and when they do so they're are not likely to expend a lot of time balancing concerns. Policy can be useful but it doesn't stand against economic demand.
Of course, it would be nice to deny dishonest enemies of Bitcoin that misinformation opening. Unfortunately, since a big reason to make the change is to make relay and mining more consistent again in order to stop screwing up block propagation/etc. they need to actually be made consistent. Imposing a 250 byte limit while significant miners impose no limit doesn't achieve that end.
Similar, the alternatives to using op_return such as fake pubkeys or inscriptions also have no such limit. So to the extent that the reason for removing the limit is because it's better for the network to use op_returns than other means, that isn't helped by limiting op_return. The people behind the opposition know this, or otherwise they'd propose a consensus change to just preclude larger opreturns-- that limit would actually work in the sense that it couldn't be bypassed by miners, but it would be outright harmful since it would just divert usage to fake pubkeys or other more harmful approach.
So really it doesn't make logical sense increase the limit less [1], it wouldn't even be a narrative win because people would just jump on these logical inconsistencies. And since the opposition is heavily relying on misinformation and outright lies, they'd probably *still* do the same attack and claim it was a result of the change-- clearly they can convince a lot of people with arguments to emotion that simply disregard the facts.
[1] technically it's still limited, but the limit is the same as the size for a standard transaction.
Wow, that really cleared up a lot about OP RETURN limits and miner behavior i didn’t know miners could already bypass the old limits and that using OP RETURN is actually safer than fake pubkeys or inscriptions. mind blowing!
Also i just learned something new: some wallets and layer-2 solutions can batch or compress OP RETURN data before broadcasting that might make the impact on nodes even smaller than we’ve been discussing.