By mid-2025, Bitcoin has already broken new highs.

Traditional financial giants such as BlackRock and the National Strategic Reserve Fund are entering the market, viewing Bitcoin as a safe-haven asset; large companies are also following in MicroStrategy’s footsteps to make Bitcoin a strategic reserve.

However, the embrace of traditional finance has not fully benefited the BTC network internally.

A ghost story is that although it’s very lively outside, the transactions on the Bitcoin network itself have entered an ice age.

According to the latest data from The Block, the 7-day moving average transaction volume on the Bitcoin network has fallen to $317,000, marking a 19-month low since October 2023. In October 2023, the price of Bitcoin was around $27,000, at that time only 270,000 transactions were packed into Bitcoin blocks in a week; now, the price of Bitcoin has reached $100,000, but only 250,000 transactions are packed into blocks each week.

In simple terms, the price has indeed risen significantly, but the Bitcoin blockchain is not very active. This figure is far lower than the peak during the outbreak of Bitcoin inscriptions in the spring of 2023.

You could say it is increasingly resembling digital gold, and trading is not high-frequency. But don’t forget that the Bitcoin miners rely on transaction fees to make a living.

The third halving in 2024 will reduce the block reward to 3.125 BTC, making transaction fees a lifeline for their income. However, on-chain activity is currently low, forcing some Miners to accept transactions below 1 sat/vB to maintain operations.

Looking back at the spring of 2023, the wave of inscriptions triggered by the Ordinals protocol once ignited ecological vitality, with BRC-20 tokens like $Ordi driving a surge in trading volume, starkly contrasting with the current slump.

The frozen BTC network urgently needs new life.

In recent days, a transaction proposal from Bitcoin Core has given everyone a hint of thawing— it aims to adjust the transaction rules of the Bitcoin network, allowing more data to be put on-chain, which may bring new life to struggling miners and cooling inscriptions.

This proposal has sparked intense discussions on foreign websites, with 700,000 views and hundreds of comments as of the time of publication, but there are few reports from domestic media.

We have organized the key content as follows.

Bitcoin Core new proposal, no limits on transactions

This proposal from Bitcoin Core is a statement regarding the transaction relay policy, co-signed by 31 relevant developers.

The core idea is that the node software of the Bitcoin network should minimize interference with transactions, allowing more economically viable transactions to be relayed and packed into blocks.

The reason this proposal has sparked widespread discussion is that it sounds like a technical adjustment, but it may actually have profound impacts on the activity on the Bitcoin chain, Miner income, and the inscription ecosystem.

First, you need to understand what a transaction relay is.

In simple terms, a transaction relay is the process by which nodes propagate transactions in the Bitcoin network.

You can compare it to a dispatcher on the highway, responsible for directing vehicles (transactions) to ensure they smoothly reach the miners’ “construction site” (packaging blocks).

In this process, nodes will determine which transactions can be propagated and which transactions need to be filtered based on certain rules.

In the past, the relay rules for Bitcoin nodes were relatively strict, especially for transactions that contained a large amount of data (such as inscription transactions), which could be rejected from propagation due to occupying block space or having insufficient transaction fees.

The proposal from Bitcoin Core puts forward an important principle: as long as the transaction has economic demand and can be accepted by miners, nodes should not obstruct its propagation.

This idea of “flexible relaying” allows the “traffic flow” of the Bitcoin network to be more free. Specifically, nodes will reduce restrictions on transaction size, fees, and other aspects, enabling more transactions to smoothly reach the miners.

The diversity of transactions will be enhanced, especially those that include non-financial data (such as inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens), which may be more easily propagated and packaged.

What does this inscription have to do with the miner?

Clearly, this policy adjustment of “flexible relaying” is also likely to remind people of a key feature in Bitcoin scripts: OP_RETURN. It is precisely this feature that is directly related to the rise of inscriptions.

OP_RETURN is an opcode in the Bitcoin script that allows users to attach a small amount of data to transactions.

The current limit for this opcode is 80 bytes; this data will not be considered a valid Bitcoin output and cannot be spent. It can be understood as a “small package” on a truck, which, although not directly involved in transactions, can store information, such as:

• File Hash (Proof of Existence)
• NFT metadata
• BRC-20 Token Information

Originally, this OP_Return was designed to record simple information, like on-chain messages. However, 80 bytes is too small to accommodate complex content, yet developers have managed to achieve significant actions with it.

In the spring of 2023, the Ordinals protocol utilized Bitcoin’s Taproot feature and OP_RETURN to allow users to mint inscriptions and tokens on the blockchain. Inscriptions achieved NFT-like functionality by embedding data into Bitcoin transactions, while BRC-20 further expanded the application scenarios for tokens.

This innovation ignited activity on the Bitcoin chain at that time, even leading to transaction congestion and a surge in miner fees, which also created a wave of inscription spring.

However, the 80-byte limit greatly restricts the development potential of OP_RETURN, as users cannot upload more complex content (such as larger images or videos), and it also limits the possibility of Bitcoin as a decentralized data storage platform.

Although the proposal mentioned above does not directly refer to OP_RETURN, its principle of “flexible relaying” may indirectly ease the restrictions on the use of OP_RETURN:

• Reduce node intervention in transactions: The proposal advocates that nodes should not refuse to propagate transactions with economic demand. If this principle is adopted, nodes will be more likely to relay transactions containing OP_RETURN data rather than refusing to propagate them due to data size or type.
• Promoting the relaxation of data restrictions: The spirit of the proposal may lay the groundwork for future relaxation of the 80-byte limit on OP_RETURN. With adjustments to relay policies, the community may further explore the feasibility of expanding OP_RETURN data capacity.
• Improve transaction propagation efficiency: Even if the data limit of OP_RETURN remains unchanged, the proposal can significantly enhance the propagation efficiency of transactions containing OP_RETURN data, avoiding transaction failures caused by node filtering.

The prosperity of inscriptions and BRC-20 once led to record-high fee revenues for Bitcoin miners. If the restrictions on OP_RETURN are relaxed, more users will be willing to pay higher fees to upload complex data. This will not only alleviate the income pressure faced by miners after the halving but also incentivize miners to support new relay policies.

It is also worth mentioning that this proposal is relatively easier to be accepted from a technical standpoint.

The adjustment of the proposal only involves the transaction relay policy, not the consensus rules of Bitcoin.

The relay policy only determines whether nodes propagate certain transactions, affecting only the efficiency of transaction dissemination, without altering the legality of the transactions. Therefore, the implementation of the proposal is relatively simple; it only requires Bitcoin Core to release a new version, and users and miners can choose whether to upgrade.

Having understood these, let’s examine a practical example and unravel its possible real-world impact.

Assuming a user wants to mint a high-resolution NFT image on the Bitcoin chain, but the image’s metadata requires 200 bytes of storage space. Under the current rules and the rules after the Bitcoin Core proposal, you can intuitively see the comparison:

Ultimately, user experience will be greatly improved, and Miner income will also increase.

This proposal from Bitcoin Core seems to be just a minor adjustment to the transaction relay policy, but it could be a key step towards the “on-chain unfreezing” of the Bitcoin network.

More importantly, this proposal provides the possibility of relaxing the restrictions on OP_RETURN, while also allowing businesses to utilize the hashes of important documents stored in Bitcoin transactions, ensuring data immutability, and there will be more room for imagination for Bitcoin’s non-financial use cases.

Community Voice

The new proposal from Bitcoin Core is like a stone thrown into a pond, stirring up a thousand layers of waves. Currently, the voices of support and opposition within the community are very clear.

For example, crypto KOL 0xTodd believes that flexible relaying has returned to Satoshi Nakamoto’s spirit of unlimitedness, allowing miners to earn more income; at the same time, he does not consider them to be garbage transactions, and inscriptions are also charged normally according to their size.

Bitcoin will never become a storage chain, but it’s not a big deal to store some data as a side job without cutting into the underlying structure.

Real physical gold can be carved to leave a record, and the BTC, which is commonly referred to as electronic gold, should also implicitly allow for this.

However, opponents are more concerned that the surge in on-chain data will cause more problems.

Under the original post of Bitcoin Core, some people also criticized the proposal, stating that Bitcoin Core “ignores the purity of Bitcoin,” turning the network into a “universal Swiss Army knife” at the expense of volunteer nodes and users’ interests.

More people are concerned that flexible relays will lead to an influx of “garbage transactions,” occupying block space.

For example, Luke Dashjr, a “hardcore” member among the core developers, directly replied “NACK” (negation) under the statement, believing that the proposal is misguided in its objectives, predicting that mined transactions are no different from censorship, which violates the principle of anti-censorship.

Glassnode data shows that the current blockchain has reached 500GB. If data surges, the costs for full nodes will skyrocket, potentially reducing decentralized nodes, and the network may slide into the abyss of centralization.

Opponents argue that Bitcoin should focus on its currency function rather than as a storage chain.

The split in the community is also reflected in the distribution of nodes. CoinDance data shows that 93% of the nodes run Bitcoin Core, while 7% use alternative clients (such as Bitcoin Knots).

Knots has become a stronghold for the opposition due to its “garbage filter” rejecting inscription transactions. If the proposal passes, Knots users may continue to resist, and the potential split risks associated with Bitcoin client usage have already surfaced.

Historical lessons are at hand; the SegWit2x controversy of 2017 nearly led to a network split. Will this debate replay a similar scenario?

The key to the future lies in community consensus.

This debate is far from over. Supporters see hope in miner income and ecological innovation, while opponents guard decentralization and monetary purity.

The fate of the proposal depends on code review on GitHub and the willingness to upgrade nodes. If the community reaches a consensus, flexible relays may be implemented within months, and the spring of inscriptions may reappear; if divisions deepen, Bitcoin’s ice age may continue, potentially leading to client forks.

This is a debate that does not belong to the price of Bitcoin; the thawing within the Bitcoin ecosystem still awaits spring.

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