“Dear Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin is and must remain censorship resistant.” That’s the promise, the battle, and the line in the sand drawn this week as Leonidas, the host of The Ordinal Show, weighs in on the raging Spam Wars, warning Bitcoin Core:
“Any serious attempt by Bitcoin Core to tighten policy rules or censor Ordinals and Runes transactions will be met with decisive action.”
Bitcoin Core: transaction censorship is a ‘dangerous precedent’
Leonidas argues that the Bitcoin network was designed to be neutral, permissionless, and open to anyone willing to pay competitive fees. To censor JPEGs, memecoins, or any on-chain experiment under the guise of ‘spam’ is to undermine what sets Bitcoin apart: resistance to censorship at the base layer. He warns:
“There is no meaningful difference between normalizing the censorship of JPEG or memecoin transactions and normalizing the censorship of certain monetary transactions by nation-states. Both would set very dangerous precedents.”
For anyone following the 2025 Spam Wars, the Core versus Knots debate is everywhere, and node operators have begun voting with their feet, flocking to Knots for its aggressive anti-spam features.
Knots’ share has ballooned from 69 nodes at the start of 2024 to over 4,200 in September 2025, now representing over 18% of the reachable network, a dramatic show of protest against Core’s upcoming v30 release.
At stake is more than OP_RETURN data limits here. It’s a battle over Bitcoin’s soul: Should the protocol remain a strictly monetary settlement layer, or can it evolve to support innovative on-chain uses, as long as transaction fees are paid?
The Ordinals and Runes perspective
The Ordinals and Runes ecosystem, according to Leonidas, has driven over half a billion in fees, supporting miners and security, while “using Bitcoin as money every day” outside of legacy narratives. They’re fed up pf being “gaslit” by Knots proponents.
Miners aren’t sitting out, either, he says. Many mining pools commanding over half of Bitcoin’s hash rate have privately expressed willingness to accept any consensus-valid transaction so long as security and implementation are sound. That’s not neutrality in name only; it’s how protocol resilience is achieved on the ground.
‘Standing with the Degens’: the Shinobi angle
Few comments captured the mood quite like Bitcoin Core’s Shinobi’s:
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“As retarded as I think all the sh*t they do is, I stand with the Degens. I will not participate or standby while a bunch of moralizing puritanical clowns try to undermine the very thing Bitcoin exists to be: a censorship resistant system.”
It’s raw, it’s frustrated, and it echoes a broader sentiment among those who think differently from Knots: resistance to any transaction censorship is non-negotiable, whether the threat is JPEGs, memecoins, or nation-state monetary disputes.
Tensions continue to boil over on X and Nostr, with miners, node operators, and developers locked in heated debates about nearly every technical detail from OP_RETURN caps to what constitutes “spam.”
Knots’ meteoric node share growth has made fragmentation and chain splits more than theoretical. As Bitcoin Core developer Peter Tood commented:
“This has gotten so out of hand that the Knots crowd are becoming a serious risk to Bitcoin.”
If adoption continues, Knots could reach 23% of the network by October, rerpreseting a tipping point for consensus. The message from Leonidas and many other degens this week is clear:
“We will not sit idly by while transaction censorship is normalized on Bitcoin. We will defend the principles that have always set Bitcoin apart, such as open access, censorship resistance, and neutrality at the base layer”.
To the gatekeepers at Bitcoin Core: Bitcoin is and must remain censorship resistant. Anything less would betray the very thing the world’s first digital currency was built to oppose.
