Its supporters call it a necessary defense against legal exposure. However, critics say it’s a misguided overreach that could fracture Bitcoin’s open ethos.
Bitcoin has endured countless ideological battles from scaling wars to environmental disputes. However, only a few have carried stakes this fundamental.
Its backers argued that the changes would enable timestamping, document verification, and decentralized authentication, without compromising the flagship digital asset’s monetary integrity.
However, Dashjr and others saw danger in the move.
They argued that the update could let anyone upload arbitrary files, including CSAM, directly onto the blockchain.
They furthered that ordinary users would be exposed to legal risk simply for running Bitcoin’s validating software since every full node must store all valid transactions.
According to the proposal:
“It allows a malicious actor to mine a single transaction with illegal or universally abhorrent content and credibly claim that Bitcoin itself is a system for distributing it, rather than a system that was merely abused.”
Considering this, the proposal urges a temporary one-year soft fork that reduces OP_RETURN capacity to 83 bytes, limits OP_PUSHDATA to 256 bytes, and caps ScriptPubKeys at 34 bytes.
The proposal added:
“By enforcing these new rules, this softfork allows the community to reject the standardization of data storage at the consensus level, closing the gap being abused.”
They argued that this patch would give developers time to “refine less restrictive rules” while preserving Bitcoin’s legal neutrality.
Unlike a hard fork, a soft fork does not split the chain immediately. Instead, it simply changes the rules so that old nodes still accept new blocks as valid. That technical subtlety makes BIP-444 so combustible as it touches consensus without triggering an outright schism.
However, the languages in the proposal have raised critical alarms within the crypto community.
Critics called this language coercive, even authoritarian, in a network that prides itself on voluntary consensus.
Meanwhile, others were less diplomatic about their criticism of the proposal.
“The BIP 444 proposal is incredibly bad. A bad actor who wants to conduct a double spend attack, could put CSAM onchain to cause a re-org and succed with their attack.”
However, Dashjr rejects those critiques, insisting that the proposal has faced “no technical objections.”
“The only way there’s a chain split is if miners were to proactively defend CSAM – and that would create CSAMchain.”
The practical risk of the contention OP_RETURN upgrade and this proposal remains uncertain because the v30 update has received significantly less adoption since its launch.
Data from Bitnodes shows that only 6.5% of nodes have upgraded to version 30.0 since launch, suggesting that most operators are watching the drama unfold from a safe distance.
However, the philosophical tension is harder to ignore. Bitcoin’s legitimacy rests on its neutrality, which allows anyone to use it, without permission, for any lawful purpose.
Yet as blockchain data becomes more expressive, that neutrality blurs. If a single transaction can expose node operators to prosecution, decentralization could unravel overnight.
So, whether it passes or not, the controversy signals a maturing dilemma for Bitcoin governance. It highlights the struggle to balance immutability with accountability in an era when blockchains are increasingly used as permanent data stores.
