If this proposal goes through, everybody is free to:
1) Fork Bitcoin Core, change the default values for OP_RETURN back, and continue to maintain the -datacarrier feature (which allows to limit the size of data put in OP_RETURN outputs, but not the data stuffed into fake public keys!).
2) Use another Bitcoin implementation, for example Luke-jr's Bitcoin Knots. That's what many critics of this PR are doing, and this is completely okay!
Honestly, I'm not sure how well he understands how Bitcoin actually works -- though to be fair, Bitcoin itself is pretty confusing. Take the statement "everybody is free to fork" for example. While technically true, it overlooks a critical reality: not everyone has equal power in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
People often misunderstand Bitcoin's consensus model by comparing it to democratic systems, like elections, where one person equals one vote. But Bitcoin doesn't work that way. In reality, it's more like a lobbying system -- those with the most influence can effectively dictate the outcome, regardless of what the majority of users or even nodes want.
Satoshi's famous quote, "1 CPU = 1 vote," reflects a vision where consensus is tied to computing power. But today, owning some BTC or running a full node doesn't give you meaningful control. If core developers, large mining pools, and major exchanges agree on a new direction, they can effectively drag the rest of the network with them -- even if thousands of smaller nodes disagree.
It may sound harsh, but let's consider a realistic scenario:
Suppose the largest mining pools, major exchanges, and data aggregators like CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko all back a hard fork.
They brand it as "Bitcoin", list it as BTC, and your Coinbase or Binance account reflects that version.
Even if only 50 nodes are running the new fork, if it has the economic momentum, longer chain, and industry support -- that becomes the de facto Bitcoin.
In the end, the Bitcoin that most of the world recognizes and uses isn't defined by ideological purity or raw node count -- it's defined by who controls the economic infrastructure.
People need to face the harsh truth. Saying things like "go write your own code" or "run your own node with your own rules" is like telling someone to "go start your own country" -- it just doesn't work that way. Your node isn't remotely as important as Foundry's. Core devs don't wait for the community to signal support -- they wait for mining pools to show interest in a protocol change. Have you ever seen Core devs posting here asking if we want to implement a new change? Did anyone ask you, or anyone else here, when they launched Taproot? Nobody did. They kept lobbying and pursuing mining pools, and once the majority of large pools opted in, Taproot became reality -- regardless of what the tens of thousands of other nodes had to say.
Obviously, Taproot was a soft fork and was adopted smoothly, but the principle remains: in Bitcoin, not all participants are equally important. Consensus isn't just a matter of majority -- it's a matter of which majority.
The truth is that the devs have no power to impose a change
That's also questionable. A great example is the UASF event, which was essentially a standoff between Core devs and every other major power.
In that case, Core devs successfully rallied the support of the wider community -- the "crowd" , and managed to outmaneuver the large mining pools. This showed that when the community and devs are aligned, they can exert real influence over consensus decisions.
However, if Core devs and miners come together and push a change in the same direction, the community's collective voice becomes mostly irrelevant, I think of the community as the stick that decision-makers use to beat each other when they disagree. But when those decision-makers are on the same page, the community is effectively invisible, powerless, and practically nonexistent in the process.
