Bitcoin is currently embroiled in a heated debate between the Red Team and the Blue Team, with tensions escalating and battle lines being drawn. The conflict revolves around whether Bitcoin should change to prevent certain types of transactions that some believe are harmful to the network. The Blue Team wants to stop these transactions, while the Red Team prefers to maintain the status quo.
The conflict stems from the increased usage of block space by transactions associated with Ordinals and Inscriptions protocols, which have led to fee spikes and transaction volume surges. The Blue Team believes that these transactions degrade Bitcoin’s usefulness as money, while the Red Team argues that the harm is overblown and the cure would be worse than the disease.
The Blue Team’s first move is to advocate for “fixing the filters,” which involves expanding the rules applied by each node to decide whether to forward a pending transaction to its peers. However, this approach is unlikely to achieve the Blue Team’s goal of preventing certain transactions due to the decentralized nature of Bitcoin.
If the conflict continues, the next step could be a fork to enforce excluding certain transactions from blocks. This would involve changing the node’s consensus rules to reject specific transactions, but this move would require extensive coordination and could take years to implement.
Ultimately, the conflict between the Red Team and the Blue Team highlights the need to improve the efficiency of block space usage and move more transactions off-chain. By focusing on increasing economic density and exploring new technologies like covenants, Bitcoin can continue to evolve and realize its full potential.
As the debate rages on, the future of Bitcoin hangs in the balance, with both sides vying for control over the network’s direction. The outcome of this conflict will shape the future of Bitcoin and determine its ability to remain a global-scale censorship-resistant permissionless database.
