Ordinals advocate Leonidas is pushing a fresh front in Bitcoin’s ongoing infrastructure fight with the proposal of DOG Mode, a new open-source client designed to bypass the restrictive transaction settings of Bitcoin Core. Leonidas is not calling for a protocol fork, consensus rules wouldn’t change, but he wants DOG Mode to let users send much larger transactions and smaller “dust” outputs than the mainline Core client permits.
Technically, his proposal lifts the maximum standard transaction size from 400,000 weight units to 3.9 million, and drops the dust threshold to just one satoshi from the Core default of roughly 294 to 546. That’s a practical ask for Ordinals fans, who want to inscribe bigger images or groups of data into single Bitcoin transactions, and for Runes protocol users who run into friction when outputs get padded just to escape Core’s relay restrictions.
But DOG Mode is only a proposal unless enough node operators run it, and unless miners accept its larger, non-standard transactions. The bigger tension is clear: as Ordinals and Runes developers push for roomier, data-rich Bitcoin use cases, Core’s approach remains more restrictive at the policy level, favoring tighter relay defaults before transactions are mined. DOG Mode turns that debate into a matter of software distribution, not protocol governance.