A fresh soft-fork concept billed as a “temporary” fix for non-monetary data on Bitcoin has ignited one of the sharpest developer rows since the blocksize wars, with critics decrying the move as censorship theater—and, more explosively, as an attempt to force changes under the specter of legal liability.
Although many in the debate refer to the document as “BIP-444,” the draft in the repository has not been assigned a number and still appears as “bip-????.mediawiki.” Even so, the conversation quickly escaped the confines of GitHub and the dev mailing list, morphing into a full-blown culture clash on X.
The draft also floats a one-year horizon by anchoring the rules to a specific block height. In the PR discussion, a reviewer asked why the document blocks at “987424,” noting that if the intent is “to have it be a year out,” the magic number should be explained in an FAQ because height would drift during debate. The author replied to “see the deployment section,” underscoring that the change is designed to expire.
What the change actually does is still being refined in the thread, but the direction is clear: clamp down on overt channels for large data blobs—explicitly OP_RETURN—and close obvious hiding spots in tapscript. One reviewer challenged the scope, noting that if the point were merely OP_RETURN, the draft would not also touch “MAST and OP_IF,” revealing that the specification aims beyond legacy datacarriers to curtail more expressive script paths that can be abused for storage.
Galaxy’s head of research Alex Thorn weighed in even more bluntly: “this is explicitly an attack on bitcoin… however it’s also incredibly stupid.” Long-time Bitcoin developer Matt Corallo summarized the cultural dissonance with acid irony: “Bitcoin devs: ‘we have to be really careful…’ This BIP: ‘YOLO’.”
Bitcoin devs: “we have to be really careful when designing forks to ensure there is never even remotely any risk that funds are effectively seized by fork activation. That would set a terrible precedent and risk Bitcoin’s longevity”
Todd also claimed to have demonstrated the futility of the approach. “Done with a decade old script that doesn’t even use segwit, let alone taproot… 100% standard and fully compatible with [Luke Dashjr’s] BIP-444,” he wrote alongside a transaction said to contain the entire text of the proposed BIP.
Done with a decade old script that doesn’t even use segwit, let alone taproot.
The episode underscores a technical reality the draft itself acknowledges: there will “always be ways to hide data,” which is precisely why the author frames the goal as raising costs, eliminating overt lanes, and—crucially—signaling that large unencrypted files are not a supported use case, thereby “minimizing legal liability for users who run nodes.”
At press time, BTC traded at $115,743.
