The developers of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal dubbed BIP-444 are divided to a great extent on the question of whether arbitrary data storage on the blockchain should be restricted. The purpose of the proposal is to impose a temporary limit on the amount of data that is not related to transactions but can be attached to Bitcoin transactions after recent changes to the network have been made.
The news of the proposal follows the release of Bitcoin Core v30, by which the limit for OP_RETURN data was basically lifted so that users could attach a larger amount of arbitrary data to transactions. Although the update has been welcomed as a move toward more flexibility, the critics argue that it may facilitate the upload of illegal or harmful content that would make node operators liable for legal risks.
BIP-444, written by a developer operating under a pseudonym “Dathon Ohm,” suggests the idea of a restriction on the number of OP_RETURN outputs and other scripts, which would prevent large data blobs and stop their abuse. It would limit OP_RETURN to 83 bytes and most scriptPubKeys to 34 bytes in addition to the limitations on Taproot and Tapscripts that would close the ways used by Ordinals inscriptions.
The changes proposed would be enacted by means of a temporary soft fork that would last for approximately one year. It would render some transactions that were previously recognized as valid, invalid, among them giving developers the time to come up with a more permanent solution for handling arbitrary data on the blockchain. The proposal refers to the soft fork as “a targeted intervention to mitigate a specific crisis,” thereby stressing that it is not a long-term shift in the philosophy of Bitcoin.
The Bitcoin community is still polarized. A long-time developer, Luke Dashjr, a hard opponent of Ordinals, paradoxically endorsed the proposal by calling it “a simple and temporary fix” to avoid centralization risks. Nevertheless, Dashjr rejected the claim that he was the author of the proposal.
Among the opponents are Jameson Lopp of Casa and Ordinals advocate Leonidas, who fiercely criticize the proposal as the source of censorship in Bitcoin, which is currently a permissionless system without any gatekeepers. They argue that if on-chain data is limited, it could be used as a basis for a more extensive censorship of transactions by government authorities or big miners.
The proposal is still a draft that needs to be sent to the Bitcoin Development Mailing List for review. Nevertheless, it has already prompted a fervent discussion of the trade-off between openness and responsibility in Bitcoin on X and developer forums.
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