A contemporary soft-fork idea billed as a “momentary” repair for non-monetary information on Bitcoin has ignited one of many sharpest developer rows for the reason that blocksize wars, with critics decrying the transfer as censorship theater—and, extra explosively, as an try to power adjustments below the specter of authorized legal responsibility.
The proposal—submitted on Oct. 24, 2025, to the Bitcoin Enchancment Proposals (BIPs) repository as “Diminished Information Short-term Softfork”—seeks to “briefly restrict arbitrary information on the consensus degree.” Authored by contributor “dathonohm,” it explicitly cites an earlier mailing-list thought from longtime developer Luke Dashjr and frames the hassle 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.”
Though many within the debate consult 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 rapidly escaped the confines of GitHub and the dev mailing listing, morphing right into a full-blown tradition conflict on X.
An ‘Assault On Bitcoin’?
On the core is a declare acquainted from the inscription/Ordinals fights of 2023–2024: Bitcoin is “a financial community,” not “an arbitrary information switch protocol.” Supporters argue that constraining arbitrary payloads is about protocol function, not adjudicating content material. Within the draft’s dialogue, the writer stresses that limiting information avoids turning Bitcoin into “a content material moderation system,” and contends that permissive information storage dangers centralization and stigma if the chain turns into referred to as a venue for unlawful materials. “Node operators shouldn’t need to defend internet hosting arbitrary information simply to take part in a financial community,” one passage reads.
The draft additionally floats a one-year horizon by anchoring the foundations to a selected block top. Within the PR dialogue, a reviewer requested why the doc blocks at “987424,” noting that if the intent is “to have it’s a yr out,” the magic quantity ought to be defined in an FAQ as a result of top 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 route is evident: clamp down on overt channels for giant information 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 instant blowback. “Luke is being very clear that he expects his soft-fork to get adopted as a consequence of authorized threats,” mentioned 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 utilize censoring reorgs to double spend,” Todd wrote, echoing BitMEX Analysis’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… nonetheless it’s additionally extremely silly.” Lengthy-time Bitcoin developer Matt Corallo summarized the cultural dissonance with acid irony: “Bitcoin devs: ‘we have now to be actually cautious…’ This BIP: ‘YOLO’.”
Bitcoin devs: “we have now to be actually cautious when designing forks to make sure there’s by no means even remotely any threat that funds are successfully seized by fork activation. That will set a horrible precedent and threat Bitcoin’s longevity”
This BIP: “YOLO” https://t.co/52nc0BlcPR
— Matt Corallo 🟠 (@TheBlueMatt) October 27, 2025
Todd additionally claimed to have demonstrated the futility of the strategy. “Executed with a decade outdated script that doesn’t even use segwit, not to mention taproot… 100% commonplace and absolutely suitable with [Luke Dashjr’s] BIP-444,” he wrote alongside a transaction mentioned to comprise all the textual content of the proposed BIP.
Executed with a decade outdated script that doesn’t even use segwit, not to mention taproot.
100% commonplace and absolutely suitable with @LukeDashjr‘s BIP-444. https://t.co/Ab7t82KYrk
— Peter Todd (@peterktodd) October 26, 2025
The episode underscores a technical actuality the draft itself acknowledges: there’ll “all the time be methods to cover information,” which is exactly why the writer frames the objective as elevating prices, eliminating overt lanes, and—crucially—signaling that giant unencrypted recordsdata should not a supported use case, thereby “minimizing authorized legal responsibility for customers who run nodes.”
If adopted, the proposal would have instant implications for protocols that piggyback on witness/script area for non-monetary payloads—Ordinals-style inscriptions foremost amongst them—at the very least for the lifetime of the momentary 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 may strand funds or encourage censoring reorgs destroys a hard-won norm: forks must not ever set a precedent the place funds will be successfully seized or transactions retroactively delegitimized.
At press time, BTC traded at $115,743.
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