Spotlight on Potential $100 Billion Influx and Bitcoin ETF Approval Amid Governance Debates

While crypto traders, tradfi investors, financial institutions and probably lots of normies and newbies were engaging in the gripping speculation over whether U.S. regulators would approve a spot bitcoin ETF, a struggle over the very soul of the Bitcoin blockchain was taking place on the open-source developer platform GitHub.

At the core of the matter was whether data-oriented applications like Ordinals inscriptions – often referred to as “NFTs on Bitcoin” – should be allowed on a network that purists argue should be preserved primarily as a settlement layer for peer-to-peer payments. In September, the longtime Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr, who sits in the latter camp, created a proposal – technically known as a “pull request” or PR – to put strict limits on the amount of data that could be stuffed into an individual transaction.

The proposal quickly touched off an acrimonious debate that went on for months, until several days ago when Ava Chow, a maintainer of the paramount Bitcoin Core software, abruptly closed the PR without taking action. “It’s abundantly clear that this PR is controversial and, in its current state, has no hope of reaching a conclusion that is acceptable to everyone,” Chow wrote, the last post in the thread. It’s possible there could be additional chapters, though, since Dashjr later tweeted, “Spam filtering isn’t dead until the spam is dead.”