There's another consensus fight going on in Bitcoin, this time over data storage size in transactions! 💾
Basically, a change was pushed by a Bitcoin Core developer to remove the arbitrary limits for the OP_RETURN field in transactions.
Many in the community were very upset by this as they want the Bitcoin blockchain to be used for monetary transfers only. As a result, the Core developers started blocking comments on Github, and all hell broke loose! 😵💫
As usual, Dash has innovated past being affected by situations like this. Here are three key reasons that Dash won't suffer the same OP_RETURN drama:
🌐 1: GOVERNANCE
The most relevant innovation here is the DAO: Dash is the oldest decentralized autonomous organization, and can actually vote to come to consensus on critical issues.
Rather than speculate on whether or not the community wants something, Dash can put it to a vote. Stakeholders vote, and the decision is written in stone.
There have been many governance proposals in Dash's history, on subjects from on-chain scaling, privacy overhauls, ideal node counts, and more. Once the vote is settled, no more drama!
As a bonus, the Dash development teams are funded by the network itself (not donations or outside interests). If developers try to do things like censor the community, they can have their funding revoked immediately. True accountability!
🧬 2: EVOLUTION CHAIN
Since September of 2024, Dash has had a second chain and network, the Evolution blockchain, purely focused on data transactions.
Not only is Evolution purpose-built for data transactions and storage (and therefore does it much more efficiently than OP_RETURN fields), it also takes place on a separate chain. This means there's no risk of a bunch of data transactions affecting the payments chain.
Users who only care about the payments chain can also only run a Core (payment chain) node, and not a Platform (Evolution chain) node. A built-in "filter" for those who want it!
🛜 3: DAPI
Finally, thanks to an innovation called the decentralized API (DAPI), Dash users can trustlessly connect to the network without running their own node.
This means that all the fighting over whose node has to store and see which data is pretty much irrelevant. Users don't need to be exposed at all!
Dash has constantly studied the rest of the space and improved on the problems the rest have experienced. No drama, just building! 💪