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Chun Wang, co-founder of the majority Bitcoin miner F2Pool, has pushed back against a proposed temporary fork aimed at limiting data spamming on the Bitcoin network.
Wang wrote in a Monday X place that “BIP-444 is a bad idea.” He added that he, and presumably F2Pool, “were not going to fork anything”, whether it was “temporary or not”.
He said: “You feel sad that some developers [are] going further and further in the wrong direction.”
Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-444 is a proposed temporary fork for the Bitcoin network aimed at limiting the inclusion of arbitrary data, which its proponents view primarily as spam. The soft fork would limit non-transactional data – allowing alternative uses for the Bitcoin blockchain – to 83 bytes, among other limitations.
Related: Bitcoin upgrade divides developers and purists
BIP-444 is its raison d’être
BIP-444 appears to be a response to a late September update leading Bitcoin node software Bitcoin Core. The update in question removed the 80 byte limit on OP_RETURNa part of a transaction script that allows the user to embed arbitrary data.
Many saw the change as the corporate capture of the Bitcoin blockchain, as it allows companies to build layer 2 and other infrastructure on Bitcoin. Additionally, some argue that allowing more arbitrary data on the chain results in faster increases in blockchain size, higher node requirements, and greater centralization.
Others said this is part of the debate which dates back to early times of Bitcoin (BTC). In addition, the proponents of the change emphasize that it is difficult to ensure that the miners enforce a rule that goes against their incentives. In January 2024 magazine revealed that miners, such as F2Pool, were already including non-standard transactions that they exceeded OP_RETURN limits.
The BIP, submitted by the pseudonymous developer Dathon Ohm, it is called “Softfork Temporary Data Reduced” and suggests “temporarily limiting the size of data fields to the consensus level”. The limit will last until Bitcoin block 987,424, or about 1.27 years from now.
In a dedicated mailing listthe creator explained that “the idea is to firmly reaffirm in consensus that bitcoin is money, not data storage.” “After a year, the soft fork expires, which gives us time to come up with a more permanent solution,” they said.
Related: Ordinals dev floats forking Bitcoin Core amid censorship concerns
What does the BIP-444 do?
BIP-444 is a temporary fork that closes most data embedding paths on Bitcoin, including tighter size caps on outputs and pushes, attachment bans, unknown witness versions, deep Taproot trees, OP_SUCCESS* and conditional branches. This limit Creation of non-fungible token (NFT) based on ordinalsbig data loads and complex scripts while keeping the money simple without affect.
The BIP text claims that with modern data compression, it is possible to embed “objective images (often illegal even to own) in as little as 300-400 bytes”. This would allow “a malicious actor to mine a single transaction with illegal or universally abhorrent content and credibly believe that Bitcoin itself is a system for distribution.”
Bitcoin developer and cypherpunk Peter Todd, on the other hand, stated that the approach is also ineffective in achieving its goal. Todd demonstrated this by embedding the entire BIP-444 text into a Bitcoin transaction which would be complete with the soft fork.
However, the proponent of the change highlighted that sending costs more than $100 in fees and argued that if the embedding of illegal data is made harder, “it would not make sense to hold the operators of nodes legally responsible”. They explained:
“If Bitcoin provides an officially supported method for storing arbitrary data […] Node operators could be held responsible for possession and distribution.”
However, some see the distinction as arbitrary and unrealistic. An X user demonstrated the idea of ​​sharing two commands that would gather data from an image stored on the Bitcoin network, highlights how scarce the differences are in practice.
