DOG Mode or SHIT Mode?

BTC is still hovering around 64k. The market seems to be waiting for something. But the community isn’t calm.

On July 17, Leonidas, a core figure in the Ordinals ecosystem and co-founder of the Runestone project, posted on X saying he wants to build a new Bitcoin client called Bitcoin $DOG Mode.

That post had no code, no repository, no version number. But it’s like a pebble thrown into a lake—the ripples have been spreading ever since, all the way to today.

To understand what DOG Mode is talking about, you first need to understand the two layers of rules for Bitcoin clients.

One layer is the consensus rules, which govern what happens on-chain—whether transactions can be written into blocks and stored persistently. If you change them, the chain forks.

The other layer is relay policy, which governs what happens in memory—whether a node accepts and forwards a transaction, and whether it includes the transaction in its own mining template. It’s temporary; in principle each node decides for itself, because its mempool doesn’t need to pass a network-wide consensus check the way blocks do.

But almost all nodes run the default configuration.

Defaults become de facto rules. That’s why Leonidas said something with obvious challenge: Core and Knots have spent years implementing rules that Bitcoin itself never mandated.

At first glance, what he said sounds somewhat reasonable. Consensus rules have no transaction weight limits, no dust limits. Those are all default values set by the client maintainers themselves.

DOG Mode wants to change two things.

First, raise the maximum relayed transaction weight from Core’s default 400 thousand weight units (WU) to 3.9 million. A Bitcoin block, in full, is 4 million weight units; Core currently relays less than a tenth of a block’s worth of transactions. DOG Mode wants to approach a whole block.

Second, lower the dust limit from 294–546 sats to 1 sat. Dust refers to those leftover outputs so small they aren’t worth relaying and storing. Dropping to 1 sat means almost no outputs will be rejected for being too small to relay.

Neither of these touches consensus rules. DOG Mode is fully compatible with Core’s block validation logic. It only changes the defaults that Core itself set.

But in reality, it’s swapping the terms while keeping the story.

The key question is what counts as so-called “Bitcoin rules.”

He exploits a loophole: rules that don’t enter the consensus layer don’t count as rules.

Long-time readers know this from several articles about Chain earlier—BIP-110. It is precisely an attempt to upgrade the unspoken rules of the policy layer into hard rules of consensus.

For the past half year, BIP-110 has been trying to push so-called “junk transaction filtering” rules into consensus—using a soft fork approach to limit the size of arbitrary on-chain data, thereby blocking Ordinals and Runes data from being shoved onto the Bitcoin main chain.

BIP-110 uses a modified BIP-9 signaling mechanism, setting a miner support threshold of 55%. By mid-July, the signaling support rate is only just over 1%, far from the 55% threshold. Whether it can keep rising is anyone’s guess.

The amazing thing about history is that all history is contemporary history.

In mid-December 2010, when Satoshi just released Bitcoin Core 0.3.18, the version included Gavin Andresen’s IsStandard check—a function to determine whether transactions meet standardness. The community blew up.

Some netizens said miners already clearly opposed it and wouldn’t use it; non-standard transactions could still happen.

Others even said: wait until I have time, I’ll make a patch for Bitcoin to remove all transaction restrictions that aren’t enforced by the network.

That last line sounds like a prophecy today. In 2010, someone on the forums said they wanted to remove restrictions. In 2026, someone actually came out saying they want to do it.

Satoshi included IsStandard despite community pressure. The function was never deleted; for 16 years it’s been core code in Core. But it’s not a consensus rule—miners can choose not to enforce it.

This historical case is something Chain thinks is worth revisiting.

Satoshi never argued for complete free-for-all. He removed opcodes, added IsStandard, and opposed embedding non-currency data into the main chain. In 2010, when discussing BitDNS, he said data applications should have their own chain; one slice of mining power should earn two rewards—that’s the optimal structure.

Complete free-for-all, everyone doing their own thing, isn’t actually consensus. It’s very likely a crowd with no discipline.

A disintegrating consensus crowd can’t support Bitcoin’s value, and it can’t support Bitcoin’s mission either.

Lu Xun once said: “People won’t agree to open the window, so first we shout about tearing down the roof.” And then everyone is less opposed to opening the window.

BIP-110 comes in with the posture of tearing down the roof: using consensus rules to force what relay policy had only suggested before.

The community argues endlessly. The signaling window is coming fast. The future remains unclear.

Right at this highly watched turning point, DOG Mode shows up shouting: I want to tear down the roof too—pushing relay policy even looser, loosened to an unprecedented degree.

It’s hard to say it isn’t just trying to catch the hype and grab attention.

He argues with his own logic: Core’s defaults are chosen by Core, not required by Bitcoin. So I can make a Core fork and run it with another set of defaults. If enough people run it, Core will naturally consider changing its own defaults.

Chain checked the latest node version statistics: first place is Knots 29.3 at 19.5%. Second is Core 31.0 at 17.9%.

Knots has long been viewed as an edge-case “tightening” client. Its supporters stayed silent for too long, to the point that many people ignored it. Yet it quietly became #1 on the entire network.

That fact breaks a popular narrative. Core is no longer sufficient to fully represent the network-wide consensus. Knots is already running on nearly one-fifth of the nodes—it’s even more than Core’s latest version. Node operators are voting with their feet.

DOG Mode’s code is still nowhere to be seen. But what it claims to do is very similar to Knots: create an alternative client that uses different defaults to attract nodes in a distributed network. The only difference is that Knots moves in the direction of tightening, while DOG Mode moves in the direction of loosening.

Client diversity competition has already happened, and the result is Knots taking the lead. If DOG Mode can truly be written and actually start running, that would be another story.

But even without code, there’s meaning—just like meme coins have meme-coin meaning (funny enough, this DOG is actually the meme coin of Runes). A single post stirred the whole community’s nerves. And that very fact shows the real state of Bitcoin governance: the battleground of defaults is no longer purely a technical issue—it’s a struggle for power of speech and community public opinion.

If you want to open the window, you first have to posture as if you’re going to tear down the roof.

If you want to tighten, shout BIP-110 once; if you want to loosen, shout DOG Mode once. As soon as you posture to tear down the roof, the people who were lying down will get scared.

This isn’t Bitcoin losing control—it’s precisely how it forms order. A decentralized network that keeps searching for boundaries amid controversy, moving forward in its own way.