Jimmy Song, co-founder of ProductionReady, a non-profit funding open-source Bitcoin software development and education, says the Bitcoin network needs a “conservative” node client to preserve its monetary properties and strengthen decentralization.
The case for conservative development
ProductionReady has a deliberate bias against significant code changes unless there is overwhelming community support, Song told Cointelegraph.
He summed up the philosophy simply:
“The general principle is: if you’re not sure a change makes the money better, don’t make it.”
Song argues that keeping node storage costs low is essential to decentralization, since higher storage and bandwidth requirements push ordinary users off the network and concentrate verification power among fewer actors.
He added:
“The more self-sovereign Bitcoin users are, the more decentralized and resilient the network becomes. When storage and bandwidth requirements grow, fewer people verify for themselves, and the network centralizes by default.”
ProductionReady plans to restore the original 83-byte OP_Return data limit for arbitrary, non-monetary information in Bitcoin transactions.
Bitcoin Core 30 and the OP_Return controversy
Node storage and onchain spam became flashpoints in 2025 after Bitcoin Core developers removed the 83-byte OP_Return limit in Bitcoin Core version 30, raising it to 100,000 bytes despite significant community pushback.
The GitHub pull request for the change received roughly four times as many downvotes as upvotes.
Bitcoin Core 30 went live in October 2025, triggering a historic surge in nodes switching to Bitcoin Knots, an alternative implementation.
Knots surges as community responds
Before the OP_Return decision was announced, only about 1% of the Bitcoin network’s hashrate was running Knots.
Today, there are 4,746 Bitcoin Knots nodes, representing over 21.7% of all nodes on the network, according to Coin Dance.
Bitcoin Core still dominates with 77.8% of nodes running some version of its software, but the Knots surge reflects growing concern within the community over the direction of Bitcoin’s reference implementation.
