Overview
- The draft, informally dubbed BIP-444, proposes a one-year soft fork to limit arbitrary data, citing concerns that larger payloads could expose node operators to criminal liability.
- Provisions reported include cutting OP_RETURN to 83 bytes, capping most ScriptPubKeys at 34 bytes, restricting data pushes to 256 bytes, limiting taproot control blocks, and disabling OP_IF in Tapscript, which would disrupt Ordinals-style inscriptions.
- The document sits as a GitHub pull request by the pseudonymous “dathonohm,” references earlier ideas from Luke Dashjr, and has not been assigned a formal BIP number or moved to the developer mailing list.
- Criticism has intensified, with Peter Todd and BitMEX Research warning of a censorship-based reorg and double-spend vector, Alex Thorn calling it an attack on Bitcoin, and demonstrations showing ways to embed data that evade the proposed limits.
- Despite the governance stakes, near-term network impact appears limited as Bitcoin Core v30 adoption remains low at about 6.5%, and supporters float user-activated and time-limited activation paths that some observers say could risk a chain split if consensus fails.