Core-enabled NFT spammer "Leonidas" is threatening to spam the network

[takuma sato]

Core-enabled NFTard spammer Leonidas is threatening to fork Bitcoin Core if Bitcoin Core stops the CSAM-enabling v30 upgrade, because that would go against his shitcoin pump-and-dump printing business:

https://x.com/LeonidasNFT/status/1964225563725291732

Here's a recording from the man himself, fuming at the idea of their pump-and-dump business being threatened:

https://x.com/_Hugo_Ramos_/status/1965701210662752567

"Im backed by a lot of economical actors". Economical actors = VC shitcoin pump and dumpers. This is the type of trash that this non-monetary circus on the blockchain is platforming.

Of course, this guy is irrelevant, but it just shows the true nature of these people in a practical manner.

And now Bitcoin Core version 30 is going to enable, not only all this dogshit spam on the network, which is already making it impossible to sync a full node properly (with assumevalid=0 and with a computer that doesn't have NSAware enabled on it, aka a computer that allows Coreboot) but basically illegal content, giving governments the perfect excuse to ban BTC when they decide to do so:

https://x.com/LukeDashjr/status/1965539551117472174

For years, there has been FUD that Bitcoin's blockchain could be criminalised by storing CSAM on it.

For years, the answer has always been that Bitcoin doesn't support data storage, and the offending content is not the blockchain itself, but the additional software used to transform the blockchain into CSAM.

By sanctioning data storage, Core 30 is eliminating that argument. There will no longer be any additional software required, your Bitcoin node itself will provide CSAM on demand, using a well-defined and officially supported format.

The very reason "CSAM on the chain" was FUD, is being _destroyed_ by Core 30. They are making it a _true_ accusation. No amount of obfuscation will change this fact.

This is not the _only_ reason to reject Core 30. But even if it was, it would _still_ be strong reason to do so.
Sep 10, 2025

What's sad is, this was predicted by Pieter Wuille (and others, with better vision than Wuille, which were already not "in the middle") more than 10 years ago:



And now it's happening. What is Core doing? Nothing, pretending like it's not a big deal, and trying to come up with some convoluted explanation as to why "filters are bad" and this and that, while allowing nodes to host garbage while resorting to logical fallacies.

The only rational explanation is that a lot of people are being paid big time by these same VC's that are making a killing from pump and dumping shitcoins.

No one of them has ever synced a node. They don't grasp the concept of an open source bios. They don't care that you will have to download CSAM to sync a node. They don't care that this incentivizes pruning even more which means less copies of the full blockchain hosted out there by decentralized parties. And beside pruning not being a safe way to run a node because it promotes this lack of copies of the full blockchain across time, that is, a bad habit, it will not save you from having downloaded CSAM during the initial blockchain download.

There is literally nothing positive about any of this. Core is doing nothing, and looks like all we got is Knots, which gives you the optional tools to stop this (which assorted shitcoiners and VC-paid "devs" are trying to paint as something that is "imposed", when the only thing imposed here is garbage being forced into the blockchain by $fiat pump and dumpers). Knots is peer reviewed by several parties and signed by them, and if you want to contribute you can become a dev.

We have to stop this at all costs. Trying to sync a node recently after years from scratch has been a good practical experience of this. You get a real feel of the status of the blockchain and you can see how around when the non-monetary circus started the verification of blocks starts taking ages and your CPU will get punished, which forces you to use a modern (NSAwared) computer to host the node. There used to be no problems when syncing a full node in a Corebooted laptop and now it's basically going to make your CPU fried. This is terrorism against proper Bitcoin nodes, let alone the other problems explained here. You are giving governments the perfect excuse to ban BTC when they need to, because this mirage of a "politically-friendly" Bitcoin Whitehouse is just that, a temporary thing (run by ironically, shitcoin grifters too, but that try to side with BTC, just like orditards do) but when these are out of the government and you get an AOC type, they are going to ban the hell out of BTC and the CSAM argument will be perfect for that. I will not be responsible to contribute into things going into this direction.

[Charles-Tim]

You can find what some people have discussed about it on this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5558645.msg65790010#msg65790010

[takuma sato]

You can find what some people have discussed about it on this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5558645.msg65790010#msg65790010

Not enough threads to stop this bs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7asu_ZyGNQE

Core devs have lost the plot.It's obvious VC money is involved, as well as potential intel agencies. We've already seen developers that stopped being developers after signing with some VC-funded crap. So you can either take out opposition or buy it. So it's most likely a mix of factors here.  Some people predicted this like 15 years ago which is why they opposed all these changes. SegWit opened the can of worms, BTC would be doing just fine without any of the extra crap, but now it's the tipping point.

[NotATether]

https://x.com/LukeDashjr/status/1965539551117472174

For years, there has been FUD that Bitcoin's blockchain could be criminalised by storing CSAM on it.

For years, the answer has always been that Bitcoin doesn't support data storage, and the offending content is not the blockchain itself, but the additional software used to transform the blockchain into CSAM.

By sanctioning data storage, Core 30 is eliminating that argument. There will no longer be any additional software required, your Bitcoin node itself will provide CSAM on demand, using a well-defined and officially supported format.

The very reason "CSAM on the chain" was FUD, is being _destroyed_ by Core 30. They are making it a _true_ accusation. No amount of obfuscation will change this fact.

This is not the _only_ reason to reject Core 30. But even if it was, it would _still_ be strong reason to do so.
Sep 10, 2025

I disagree with Dashjr's assessment that this is FUD. Because simply making a statement: "We allow all kinds of data on our network" does not remove any liability from the users. If anything, it increases their liability, because then LE can tell the courts that the developers were aware of its use for that. Has everyone forgotten about the Roman Storm trial already? Oh and by the way, this same fate awaits eXch developers if they get caught.

By converting Core into some decentralized form of Amazon S3, you are enabling new use cases, but you are also opening up massive risks to 3rd party developers who expose these datacarrier methods to users via software, if the users abuse these methods in ways that it's illegal by their governments.

(Reading it again, I see we even agree on some points.)

[d5000]

The OP_RETURN limit increase (which is a standardness/policy increase, to those who don't known, not an increase of some consensus limit) does not create additional incentives to store arbitrary data on the blockchain.

In other words: It doesn't get cheaper to create NFTs and similar stuff with Core 30 than with Core 29.

So it's extremely unlikely that "VC capital" is behind that move. Why should they pay the developers if all tools they need are already at their disposition, and the limit increase does not make anything cheaper?

The topic has been discussed at nauseam, and the problem is always the same: there is no way to stop data spam, you can make it a bit more expensive but then you would have to cripple a lot of other use cases, like Lightning, and as far as I know you would also need to store more data on-chain in "real financial" transactions.

Contiguous vs non-contiguous illegal data is not really relevant. If you store the data inside P2PK outputs (a kind of the "fake public key" method available since 2009) it would probably even "look" like image data with some dots here and there. Transactions are not stored in JSON format .

Short example: We have a random data string which could contain an image and is currently non-standard as an OP_RETURN in BTC 29 ...

Code:

af193e9191dc485bbb5c516e43bff608bdd6de08365a4e3e827b314dff718dcb67672a3a837547b6bab3b33f632fb2b431d82c14d8d14326888ba3c4b72902ac681
ef39658f847e9b84c99e22dd63fe62a106df9e2f64987a2bd0ee4be3a86bc445459c1d529475ba3eb061744c7d1383420a22b0457419d810b2975fbc082ec

Posting it as a series of P2PK outputs (the 0s at the start are the values, and the 43 is the script length of 67 bytes of the script, 65 for the pubkey and 1 for each opcode):

Code:

0000000000000000
43
OP_PUSHBYTES_65
af193e9191dc485bbb5c516e43bff608bdd6de08365a4e3e827b314dff718dcb67672a3a837547b6bab3b33f632fb2b431d82c14d8d14326888ba3c4b72902ac681
OP_CHECKSIG
0000000000000000
OP_PUSHBYTES_65
43
ef39658f847e9b84c99e22dd63fe62a106df9e2f64987a2bd0ee4be3a86bc445459c1d529475ba3eb061744c7d1383420a22b0457419d810b2975fbc082ec000000
OP_CHECKSIG

Which results in the following inputs (41 is OP_PUSHBYTES_65, ac is OP_CHECKSIG) :

Code:

00000000000000004341af193e9191dc485bbb5c516e43bff608bdd6de08365a4e3e827b314dff718dcb67672a3a837547b6bab3b33f632fb2b431d82c14d8d14326888ba3c4b72902ac681ac
00000000000000004341ef39658f847e9b84c99e22dd63fe62a106df9e2f64987a2bd0ee4be3a86bc445459c1d529475ba3eb061744c7d1383420a22b0457419d810b2975fbc082ec000000ac

We see: The "obfuscation" by using P2PK instead of OP_RETURN is not really relevant. Those distributing illegal material would be happy if it was enough to add a couple of zeroes, and an "43", an "41" and an "ac" here and there.

And if it really was relevant: would "VC Capital" not be aware of this potential danger? Why would they bribe Core -- as I wrote above, they have already all the tools to store NFT collections almost as big as they want, even using cheaper means?

Doesn't that contradict the whole bribery complot story?

This may be a deliberate attack on Bitcoin using some users' emotions and the mechanisms of social media, to cause confusion and later establish a new development team without any Cypherpunk values left. That's my (not entirely serious) conspiracy theory, but it is even more plausible than the bribery theory


A in-depth solution to the "spam problem" would be a different way to store the blockchain, where no full node would need to store OP_RETURNs anymore, nor any outputs in raw form. Utreexo is already a step in that direction, but still we need archival nodes for the block data. It should however be possible with zero knowledge techniques to ensure an initial block download without any real transaction data. AFAIK some altcoins have already achieved this.

BTW: if I already mentioned altcoins, shouldn't be Ethereum or Solana now be full of illegal data if everything can be stored there already? I don't care about them, but that this doesn't seem to be a problem makes the fears around Bitcoin 30 even less convincing.

[ABCbits]

Core-enabled NFTard spammer Leonidas is threatening to fork Bitcoin Core if Bitcoin Core stops the CSAM-enabling v30 upgrade

And now Bitcoin Core version 30 is going to enable, not only all this dogshit spam on the network, which is already making it impossible to sync a full node properly (with assumevalid=0 and with a computer that doesn't have NSAware enabled on it, aka a computer that allows Coreboot) but basically illegal content, giving governments the perfect excuse to ban BTC when they decide to do so:

You worry it will happen, but in fact someone already do that. I'll just refer to my previous reply.

--snip--
It's just an example that i remember right away, there are all kinds of data stored on Bitcoin even since a decade ago[1]. Should i mention that research from few years ago discover some kind of content including hundreds link to child porn[2]? Should i also mention shortly after Ordinal launch, someone use it to add porn/explicit image[3]?

If you run non-pruned Bitcoin full node, your device already store such data.

[1] https://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html#ref14
[2] https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf, section 4.3 Investigating Blockchain Files.
[3] https://crypto.news/bitcoin-ordinals-encounters-explicit-images-days-after-launch/

And since you mentioned computer that allow/support coreboot, https://coreboot.org/end_users.html mention some relative new/modern device that support it where i expect it's powerful enough to run Bitcoin Core.

[Satofan44]

I disagree with Dashjr's assessment that this is FUD. Because simply making a statement: "We allow all kinds of data on our network" does not remove any liability from the users. If anything, it increases their liability, because then LE can tell the courts that the developers were aware of its use for that. Has everyone forgotten about the Roman Storm trial already? Oh and by the way, this same fate awaits eXch developers if they get caught.

By converting Core into some decentralized form of Amazon S3, you are enabling new use cases, but you are also opening up massive risks to 3rd party developers who expose these datacarrier methods to users via software, if the users abuse these methods in ways that it's illegal by their governments.

(Reading it again, I see we even agree on some points.)

The developers have been in their positions for too long. They act like know-it-alls even though have little knowledge of anything except the field that they are specialized in. Nobody can predict the negative consequences of this. I don't want to store this data on my machine in any shape or form. Obfuscated or not. Just because it already is in there that does not mean that we should not try to prevent more of it being added.
It is no longer wise to recommend people to install a full node these days. Technological maximalism is changing what Bitcoin is about. Their elitist stance prevents them from learning any lessons from events that are happening on other chains.

BTW: if I already mentioned altcoins, shouldn't be Ethereum or Solana now be full of illegal data if everything can be stored there already? I don't care about them, but that this doesn't seem to be a problem makes the fears around Bitcoin 30 even less convincing.

It probably is, but who is analyzing those for that? They both can be much more easily shut down if there is a need to attack them. Now that you mention them there is a practical lesson from those chain regarding the consequences of making spam easier. The introduction of the token standard in ETH brought a massive wave of spam and scams. In Solana the situation was not as bad until pump.fun made it easy for any idiot to make a token and scam people. My making it hard to create spam, we already prevent a large super majority of people of ever doing any spamming via any methods. Good start towards solving a difficult problem.

The refusal to patch the taproot vulnerability was Bitcoin Core's pump.fun moment. Had they patched it we would have never had the ordinals spam and scams.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[d5000]

The refusal to patch the taproot vulnerability was Bitcoin Core's pump.fun moment. Had they patched it we would have never had the ordinals spam and scams.

We would then probably have seen a massive Bitcoin Stamps wave. They were just gaining traction in 2023, when Ordinals also began to thrive.

Stuff like this:

https://stampchain.io/stamp/7c48691bf8cfafa66b1d938ada4c2c778c07a49c1a0683f969c29b94363a0fec
https://stampchain.io/stamp/4ad148f40dbb5ee343ec65f0914f170b3011a1e8c6f2f36bc13029ea452a71fe
https://stampchain.io/stamp/9988ce8a27623bf2e2c37647e1f62daf18117bfa112d0422831941d312140a78

Or "UTXO punks":

https://stampchain.io/collection/detail/utxo_punks

Everything embedded in the UTXO set too, so nodes have to store it twice, not once like with OP_RETURN. Unstoppable, because they use fake public keys. Nobody can filter it at this moment.

According to the Stampchain explorer, even with the Ordinals wave thriving in parallel, there are 1245764 Bitcoin Stamps transactions. They will reside forever in the UTXO set.

But hey, we can't do anything about that, so we have to block and filter less costly/harmful spam and feel like we've saved Bitcoin! And those who don't want that, are elitists and funded by VC capital!

(Who is funding Stampchain, by the way?)

But utreexo + ZeroSync may be a solution even for this problem (but also for any OP_RETURN excess). I don't want to repeat myself.

[nutildah]

We can only dream that Leonidas is actually going to fork off and leave BTC, hopefully taking a lot of the mindless degen crowd with him. In reality its all talk. This is what he does -- craft compelling narratives that rally the particular crowd of suckers that for some reason still follow him. They know his projects are pump n dump B.S. but they are hoping to get in and out of the next thing before the next guy -- that's the delusional, short-term mindset you are dealing with here.

Most of the appeal of what he's selling comes from the fact that its on Bitcoin. If he moved to a fork the narrative wouldn't be nearly as compelling, and he knows this, so he'll never do it. He's just really good at talking BS in a way that resonates with other opportunistic BSers.

[Satofan44]

The refusal to patch the taproot vulnerability was Bitcoin Core's pump.fun moment. Had they patched it we would have never had the ordinals spam and scams.

We would then probably have seen a massive Bitcoin Stamps wave. They were just gaining traction in 2023, when Ordinals also began to thrive.

Maybe, I actually totally missed that stampchain was a thing and thought that it came only sometime after Ordinals.

Everything embedded in the UTXO set too, so nodes have to store it twice, not once like with OP_RETURN. Unstoppable, because they use fake public keys. Nobody can filter it at this moment.

Terrible junk that I don't want anywhere near my node, but I am forced to keep it by a lack of solutions. On one hand the issue sucks because the easiest way to solve this it is also the worst way in terms of consequence and precedent. Blacklist every stampchain UTXO. Problem solved and Bitcoin destroyed at the same time.   On the other hand I always wonder how and where they manage to find Bitcoin users who support and engage in these things. Nothing about this is "cool". It goes against everything that Bitcoin is meant to be and it hurts it in just about every way. You can't be a Bitcoiner and support this at the same time.

But hey, we can't do anything about that, so we have to block and filter less costly/harmful spam and feel like we've saved Bitcoin! And those who don't want that, are elitists and funded by VC capital!

Many of us are not content with doing nothing when we can't solve everything, we'd rather do something. Nothing wrong with feeling good after a good day of work?  

(Who is funding Stampchain, by the way?)

Who is indeed?

[BitGoba]

BTW: if I already mentioned altcoins, shouldn't be Ethereum or Solana now be full of illegal data if everything can be stored there already? I don't care about them, but that this doesn't seem to be a problem makes the fears around Bitcoin 30 even less convincing.

Bitcoin is designed to be peer-to-peer digital cash , money. This means that Bitcoin is a monetary protocol intended only for monetary transactions. I’ve been following the discussion a bit, and I think those Core developers are completely economically illiterate,they don’t understand what Bitcoin is.Bitcoin is not a blockchain platform like Solana or Ethereum.Bitcoin is money,the best money humanity has ever had.It is good because it can perform all the functions of money that no other money has been able to do so far. It is also reliable because it has a fixed monetary policy that anyone can guarantee by running their own node.If an ordinary person can’t run a node because it has become too expensive, then only a small group of people and companies decide on consensus and what Bitcoin is,just like with Solana and Ethereum shitcoins, where nodes are run only by companies and insiders, or like in the fiat system, where a central committee of a central bank makes the decisions.that would effectively destroy the core idea of Bitcoin.

The other side, like Luke Dashjr and BTC Mechanics, understand the essence of Bitcoin much better than the Bitcoin Core team. That’s why some believe the Core team should be rejected and replaced with developers who truly prioritize Bitcoin’s monetary principles and decentralization, instead of adding unnecessary features or enabling spam and shitcoins.

[d5000]

Maybe, I actually totally missed that stampchain was a thing and thought that it came only sometime after Ordinals.

And that's the problem, I think 90% of the "Core-opposing" group do not understand at all what this all is about really. I don't want to be elitist, but it is a bit frustrating that people like the OP of this thread, who I consider intelligent and are fiercely opposing the OP_RETURN change (which is completely OK!) have never actually bothered to address the problem of UTXO set pollution in their posts.

But I'm already about to buy popcorn and not care anymore about that drama. If Knots/the Core-opposing camp wins this battle and now a lot of data is filtered, then I really hope that Utreexo advances fast enough to stop the UTXO set pollution. It could be a OpSec problem though, if a lot of nodes begin to run hobbyist clients with Utreexo support, like Floresta or utreexod because they don't want to store the UTXO junk anymore.

Perhaps we are also lucky and the relative tranquility in the NFT market persists, and we can chill?

Blacklist every stampchain UTXO. Problem solved and Bitcoin destroyed at the same time.

Would not work, as you can only block them after they are already mined. The Stampchain guys can transmit them secretly to the miners.

Their protocol currently could still be blocked becuase they use a very short OP_RETURN which could be detected and filtered in theory. But other implementations of "fake public keys", which only use the fake public keys or even encode the data in addresses (pubkey hashes) can not be stopped nor filtered. Stampchain can change their protocol at any time if someone is trying to block them.

Many of us are not content with doing nothing when we can't solve everything, we'd rather do something. Nothing wrong with feeling good after a good day of work?  

The problem is that the medicine is probably more harmful than the illness. In the very best case it has the same outcome.

-- irrelevant post --

Nobody here likes the spam. Please read my post again! It is about harmful spam vs. more harmful spam. Do you think Stampchain's "UTXO punks" collection, residing in the UTXO set and molesting the node operators, are better than hypothetic OP_RETURN punks which can be pruned by the nodes when they want? Even the Ordinals punks are better than the UTXO punks, but they also pollute the UTXO set somewhat.

If you don't understand what I'm talking about: that's the root of the issue, and 90% seem to have absolutely no clue.

[nutildah]

I'd like to further examine how stupid this post is:

I’ve been following the discussion a bit, and I think those Core developers are completely economically illiterate,they don’t understand what Bitcoin is.

WOW. The Core developers don't understand what Bitcoin is? Are you sure about that? They are only the most experienced group of Bitcoin developers on the planet. As such, they have a better understanding of Bitcoin than anybody on the planet, except for maybe some former Core developers, and Satoshi, of course.

Do you think Stampchain's "UTXO punks" collection, residing in the UTXO set and molesting the node operators, are better than hypothetic OP_RETURN punks which can be pruned by the nodes when they want?

He has no idea what you're talking about and won't respond.

Whats funny is stuff like Stampchain will be completely forgotten about a couple of years from now.

[Alphakilo]

You can find what some people have discussed about it on this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5558645.msg65790010#msg65790010

Not enough threads to stop this bs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7asu_ZyGNQE

Core devs have lost the plot.It's obvious VC money is involved, as well as potential intel agencies. We've already seen developers that stopped being developers after signing with some VC-funded crap. So you can either take out opposition or buy it. So it's most likely a mix of factors here.  Some people predicted this like 15 years ago which is why they opposed all these changes. SegWit opened the can of worms, BTC would be doing just fine without any of the extra crap, but now it's the tipping point.

This is obviously a political and economic maneuver meant to create a FUD within the Bitcoin ecosystem over the network being strictly decentralized or it being focused on the normal p2p cash system of monetary transactions.

This threat to spam the network may highlight serious ongoing tensions and my pain is Leonidas or whoever is behind the bigger picture, is trying to use the open-source nature of Bitcoin to manipulate  real time core developers to maintain policies that is convenient with the ordinals ecosystem which fundamentally changes how Bitcoin is used.

[PepeLapiu]

The OP_RETURN limit increase (which is a standardness/policy increase, to those who don't known, not an increase of some consensus limit) does not create additional incentives to store arbitrary data on the blockchain.

My problem here is more with the narrative around the whole thing.

In the past, like in 2012 when the first instance of CSAM on chain came up, everyone was running around with our hair on fire about the whole thing. And rightfully so.

We all understood that was a problem, an attack vector.

At that time, there was nobody stupid enough to argue that it was "a consensus valid transaction" or that "he paid his miner fee". We would have strung you up if you had tried to say such stilupid thing.

But today that is precisely the argument the core/spam apologists are making. That as long as it's consensus valid, as long as they pay their miner fees, it's all fair game.

Guess what genius? If the miner fee had not been paid, and if it was not consensus valid, it would have never gotten on chain.

The argument that it's all valid transactions and they paid their miner fee shows you there is a deliberate attempt to justify and normalize spam and arbitrary data. And that is very scary.