Reminder: The social contract wasn't broken by Core, it was broken in February 2024 when MARA launched Slipstream. Slipstream is a service to mine any consensus valid transaction for the right fee, bypassing normal mempool policy entirely. This contract was technically enforced by mempool filters like the 83-byte OP_RETURN limit, however Mara’s Slipstream proved that these filters were just "gentlemen's agreements" that large miners could bypass at will. Core's op return changes 20 months later weren't "enabling spam", they were acknowledging this broken contract and that the filter had already failed because you can't enforce gentlemen's agreements when miners are openly advertising they'll ignore them. These changes once again even the playing field for those wanting to get their transactions mined. It's harm reduction, plain and simple.

And it wasn’t just Slipstream either. By early 2024, Libre Relay and F2Pool were also providing a secondary P2P layer for transactions that Core’s filters rejected. When you have a parallel relay network feeding the world's largest mining pools, the 83-byte limit didn't stop a single byte of data, it just made the public mempool blind to what was actually happening on the wire. The social contract didn't just break, it was bypassed by a better funded engineering reality.