Open Letter to Bitcoin Core: “Bitcoin needs to continue to withstand censorship”

“Dear Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin must remain censored.” That’s the line in the sand depicted this week as Leonidas, the host of the Order Show, warning Bitcoin Core with emphasis on the fierce spam war.

“The serious attempts by Bitcoin Core to close policy rules, censorship ordinances and rune transactions will be met with decisive action.”

Bitcoin Core: Transaction Censorship is a “dangerous precedent”

Leonidas argues that the Bitcoin network is designed to be neutral, unauthorized and open to anyone willing to pay the competition fee. Censoring experiments with JPEG, memokine, or chains under the guise of “spam” is a nuisance of what makes Bitcoin stand out. Resistance to censorship at the basic level. He warns:

“There is no meaningful difference between normalizing censorship for JPEG or MemeCoin transactions and normalizing censorship for specific financial transactions by nation-states. Both set a very dangerous precedent.”

For those following the 2025 Spam War, the core vs knot debate is everywhere, with node operators starting their voting on their feet and swarming the knots for aggressive spam anti-spam features.

Knots’ Share has swelled from 69 nodes at the start of 2024 to over 4,200 in September 2025, and now accounts for more than 18% of Reachable Network, a dramatic show of protests over Core’s upcoming V30 release.

If you are at risk, here is above the OP_Return data limit. It’s a battle for the soul of Bitcoin. Should the protocol remain strictly a financial settlement layer, or can it evolve to support innovative on-chain use as long as transaction fees are being paid?

Ordinal and Rune perspective

According to Leonidas, the ordinance and rune ecosystems drive more than five billion fees, while supporting miners and security, and support “using Bitcoin as money every day” outside of the legacy story. They are tired of PF, which is “gaslit” by knot supporters.

The miners aren’t sitting either, he says. Many mining pools that command more than half of Bitcoin’s hashrate are personally stating their willingness to accept consensus variant transactions as long as security and implementation is sound. It’s not neutrality just by name. It is how the resilience of the protocol is achieved on the ground.

“Standing to a Degree”: Shinobi Angle

Few comments captured the feeling of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit

“I stand with my degree as I’m late as I think it’s all they do. I don’t take part or wait.

It is raw, frustrating, reflecting broader emotions among people who think differently than the knot. Whether the threat is a JPEG, Memecoin, or a financial dispute across the country, resistance to censorship of transactions is unnegotiable.

Tension continues to boil with X and Nostr as miners, node operators and developers are locked into heated debates for almost every technical detail from Miner, Node operators and developers that make up “spam.”

The growth of meteor node sharing in knots resulted in more fragmentation and chain division than theory. As commented by Bitcoin Core developer Peter Tood:

“This is so unruly unmanageable that the knot crowd is becoming a serious risk for Bitcoin.”

If recruitment continues, Knott could reach 23% of the network by October, recording a turning point for consensus. The messages from Leonidas and many other degrees this week are clear.

“We don’t sit vaguely while transactional censorship is normalized with Bitcoin. We defend the principles that have always made Bitcoin stand out, such as open access, censorship resistance, and neutrality in the basic layer.”

For gatekeepers of Bitcoin Core: Bitcoin must remain censored. Nearly that would betray the very thing the world’s first digital currency was constructed to oppose.