Chun Wang, co-founder of the prominent Bitcoin mining pool F2Pool, has expressed opposition to a proposed temporary soft fork intended to curb data spam on the Bitcoin network.
In a post on Monday via X, Wang stated that “BIP-444 is a bad idea.” He emphasized that both he and presumably F2Pool are “not going to soft fork anything,” irrespective of whether it is “temporary or not.”
“Feel sad that some developers are moving further and further in the wrong direction,” he remarked.
The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-444 aims to impose a temporary soft fork on the Bitcoin network, with the goal of limiting the inclusion of arbitrary data, which its supporters primarily deem spam. This soft fork seeks to cap non-transaction data — allowing alternative applications on the Bitcoin blockchain — to 83 bytes, among other restrictions.
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BIP-444 and its rationale
BIP-444 seems to be a response to a Bitcoin Core update from late September, which lifted the 80-byte limit on OP_RETURN, a component of transaction scripts enabling users to embed arbitrary data.
Many perceive this change as corporate influence over the Bitcoin blockchain, facilitating companies in developing layer-twos and other infrastructures on Bitcoin. Additionally, critics argue that allowing greater arbitrary data on-chain leads to faster growth in blockchain size, elevated node requirements, and increased centralization.
Others have pointed out that this debate traces back to Bitcoin’s early days. Proponents of the change highlight the difficulty in ensuring miners comply with rules that contradict their incentives. A January 2024 review revealed that miners, like F2Pool, have already been incorporating non-standard transactions exceeding OP_RETURN limits.
The proposal, submitted by the pseudonymous developer Dathon Ohm, is termed a “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork” and recommends “temporarily limiting the size of data fields at the consensus level.” This limit would extend to Bitcoin block 987,424, which is approximately 1.27 years from now.
In a dedicated mailing list, the creator explained that “the aim is to strongly reaffirm in consensus that Bitcoin is money, not data storage.” “After a year, the soft fork will expire, giving us time to devise a more permanent solution,” they elaborated.
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What does BIP-444 accomplish?
BIP-444 serves as a temporary soft fork that restricts most data-embedding mechanisms on Bitcoin, imposing stricter size limits on outputs and eliminating annex, unknown witness versions, deep Taproot trees, OP_SUCCESS*, and conditional branches. This curtails the creation of Ordinal-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs), large data uploads, and intricate scripts while leaving simple monetary transactions unaffected.
The BIP text contends that with modern data compression, it is feasible to embed “objectionable images (often illegal to even possess) in as few as 300–400 bytes.” This allows “a malicious actor to mine a single transaction with illegal or universally offensive content and convincingly assert that Bitcoin itself is a medium for distributing it.”
Conversely, Bitcoin developer and cypherpunk Peter Todd argued that the method is ineffective in achieving its intended outcome. Todd illustrated this by embedding the entire text of BIP-444 into a Bitcoin transaction compliant with the soft fork.
However, the proponent of the change noted that sending it incurs over $100 in fees and reasoned that if embedding illegal data is made more challenging, “it would not be logical to hold node operators legally accountable.” They clarified:
“If Bitcoin provides an officially endorsed method of storing arbitrary data […] node operators could conceivably be held responsible for possession and distribution.“
Nonetheless, some consider the distinction to be arbitrary and impractical. One X user demonstrated the concept by sharing two commands that could retrieve data from an image stored on the Bitcoin network, emphasizing how marginal the differences are in reality.
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