By repeatedly adjusting default mempool policy to match what miners will accept anyway (large OP_RETURN uncapped because “they’ll just mine it via bypasses like Libre Relay, or direct APIs”), we are implicitly conceding that miner greed + economic incentives are the ultimate rule-setter, not node-enforced principles. Meaning a (cleverly hidden) capitulation of Bitcoin as a decentralized project. You could say that the “CENSORSHIP!” argument from Core and their supporters on the concept of nodes filtering is a roundabout way of critizing decentralization itself. Nodes were always supposed to be the sovereign check, they decide what they accapt and relay. When we keep loosening policy to align with whatever is the current grift “use case”, and by extension what is short term profitable for miners, it trains the entire ecosystem to treat restrictive node behavior as pointless theater. Over time this hollows out node sovereignty: running a full node becomes more about passively observing the chain that miners + L2s + data-spammers have already decided on, rather than actively enforcing a monetary-first standard. As a cuck bonus it also leads to higher resource costs for every honest node (bandwidth, RAM, storage) à fewer independent verifiers in practice Decentralization starts looking like a performance act. Miners produce the blocks, a handful of relays and L2 sequencers steer the flow, and nodes just… validate after the fact. It’s not a hard-fork capitulation (consensus rules haven’t changed), but it is a cultural, philosophical and operational one. The most profound capitulation in practice. The philosophy flips from “Bitcoin should resist non-monetary garbage even if it costs us some short-term fee revenue” to “whatever pays miners gets standardized because resistance is futile.” Once you accept “miners will do it anyway” as the justification for policy, you’ve already handed the character of Bitcoin over to the highest bidder. Nodes stop being the immune system and start becoming just a polite audience. The OP_RETURN uncap looks a lot like another quiet step toward a two-tier network (miners + insiders set the tone, everyone else just watches. Keep doing this and running a node risks becoming a branding exercise instead of the actual source and guarantee of Bitcoin’s decentralization.