An Ordinals Developer Launches "DOG Mode" to Reopen Bitcoin's Fight Over Blockspace

Bitcoin's recurring argument over the purpose of its scarce blockspace has entered a new phase. Leonidas, a prominent advocate for the Ordinals and Runes protocols that inscribe data on Bitcoin, has announced an open-source client called DOG Mode that would loosen the relay rules Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots have been tightening. As CoinDesk explains, the client would raise the maximum standard transaction size that nodes will forward from 400,000 weight units to 3.9 million, near a full block, and cut the dust limit, the threshold below which an output is deemed too small to relay, to a single satoshi.

The distinction from the competing proposal is the point. BIP-110 would change Bitcoin's consensus rules to restrict non-financial data and requires broad miner adoption to take effect. DOG Mode only changes what individual nodes relay, so a single cooperating miner could include such transactions. Leonidas argues the current dust padding immobilizes roughly $25 million that the change would release back to Ordinals and Runes users.

The opponents of on-chain data point to their own numbers, which show a stalled path. Ocean Mining's vice president of development, Jason Hughes, argues that BIP-110 lacks measurable consensus, with node signaling around 7 to 15% and hashrate support under 1%. DOG Mode, for its part, currently exists only as an announcement, with no repository, code or benchmark yet published.

The deeper question is governance, not data. Bitcoin has no central authority to settle whether blockspace should carry arbitrary bytes or only monetary transfers, so each proposal becomes a live test of how the network changes its own rules. That either side can release software and ask miners and node operators to choose is the mechanism working as designed, and also the reason these disputes never fully resolve.