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Bitcoin Developers Clash Over Soft Fork Proposal To Combat ‘Spam’

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A contemporary soft-fork idea billed as a “non permanent” repair for non-monetary knowledge on Bitcoin has ignited one of many sharpest developer rows because the blocksize wars, with critics decrying the transfer as censorship theater—and, extra explosively, as an try to drive adjustments underneath the specter of authorized legal responsibility.

The proposal—submitted on Oct. 24, 2025, to the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) repository as “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork”—seeks to “quickly restrict arbitrary knowledge on the consensus stage.” Authored by contributor “dathonohm,” it explicitly cites an earlier mailing-list concept from longtime developer Luke Dashjr and frames the trouble as a short-run measure whereas longer-term designs are pursued. The pull request was labeled “New BIP,” with dialogue organized round two activation paths described as “proactive” and “reactive.”

Although many within the debate discuss with the doc as “BIP-444,” the draft within the repository has not been assigned a quantity and nonetheless seems as “bip-????.mediawiki.” Even so, the dialog shortly escaped the confines of GitHub and the dev mailing listing, morphing right into a full-blown tradition conflict on X.

An ‘Attack On Bitcoin’?

At the core is a declare acquainted from the inscription/Ordinals fights of 2023–2024: Bitcoin is “a financial community,” not “an arbitrary knowledge switch protocol.” Supporters argue that constraining arbitrary payloads is about protocol function, not adjudicating content material. In the draft’s dialogue, the writer stresses that limiting knowledge avoids turning Bitcoin into “a content material moderation system,” and contends that permissive knowledge storage dangers centralization and stigma if the chain turns into referred to as a venue for unlawful materials. “Node operators shouldn’t must defend internet hosting arbitrary knowledge simply to take part in a financial community,” one passage reads.

The draft additionally floats a one-year horizon by anchoring the principles to a selected block peak. In the PR dialogue, a reviewer requested why the doc blocks at “987424,” noting that if the intent is “to have or not it’s a yr out,” the magic quantity needs to be defined in an FAQ as a result of peak would drift throughout debate. The writer replied to “see the deployment part,” underscoring that the change is designed to run out.

What the change truly does continues to be being refined within the thread, however the course is evident: clamp down on overt channels for big knowledge blobs—explicitly OP_RETURN—and shut apparent hiding spots in tapscript. One reviewer challenged the scope, noting that if the purpose have been merely OP_RETURN, the draft wouldn’t additionally contact “MAST and OP_IF,” revealing that the specification goals past legacy datacarriers to curtail extra expressive script paths that may be abused for storage.

That breadth—mixed with the doc’s rhetoric—sparked rapid blowback. “Luke is being very clear that he expects his soft-fork to get adopted due to legal threats,” stated cryptographer Peter Todd.

He additionally amplified a separate line of assault: that the change may perversely create a censorship-based double-spend vector. “BIP-444 creates a ‘C-SCAM’ assault the place you employ censoring reorgs to double spend,” Todd wrote, echoing BitMEX Research’s warning {that a} malicious actor may embed unlawful content material on-chain “to trigger a re-org and succeed with their assault,” thereby creating “an financial incentive for onchain CSAM.”

Galaxy’s head of analysis Alex Thorn weighed in much more bluntly: “that is explicitly an assault on bitcoin… nevertheless it’s additionally extremely silly.” Long-time Bitcoin developer Matt Corallo summarized the cultural dissonance with acid irony: “Bitcoin devs: ‘we’ve to be actually cautious…’ This BIP: ‘YOLO’.”

Todd additionally claimed to have demonstrated the futility of the method. “Done with a decade previous script that doesn’t even use segwit, not to mention taproot… 100% commonplace and absolutely appropriate with [Luke Dashjr’s] BIP-444,” he wrote alongside a transaction stated to comprise your entire textual content of the proposed BIP.

The episode underscores a technical actuality the draft itself acknowledges: there’ll “all the time be methods to cover knowledge,” which is exactly why the writer frames the objective as elevating prices, eliminating overt lanes, and—crucially—signaling that enormous unencrypted recordsdata will not be a supported use case, thereby “minimizing authorized legal responsibility for customers who run nodes.”

If adopted, the proposal would have rapid implications for protocols that piggyback on witness/script house for non-monetary payloads—Ordinals-style inscriptions foremost amongst them—at the least for the lifetime of the non permanent fork. Critics counter that treating such exercise as “abuse” is a normative transfer masquerading as neutrality, and that activating even a short lived fork which might strand funds or encourage censoring reorgs destroys a hard-won norm: forks must not ever set a precedent the place funds may be successfully seized or transactions retroactively delegitimized.

At press time, BTC traded at $115,743.

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