A fresh soft-fork concept billed as a “temporary” fix for non-monetary data on Bitcoin has ignited one of the sharpest developer rows since the blocksize wars, with critics decrying the move as censorship theater—and, more explosively, as an attempt to force changes under the specter of legal liability.

The proposal—submitted on Oct. 24, 2025, to the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) repository as “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork”—seeks to “temporarily limit arbitrary data at the consensus level.” Authored by contributor “dathonohm,” it explicitly cites an earlier mailing-list idea from longtime developer Luke Dashjr and frames the effort as a short-run measure while longer-term designs are pursued. The pull request was labeled “New BIP,” with discussion organized around two activation paths described as “proactive” and “reactive.”

Although many in the debate refer to the document as “BIP-444,” the draft in the repository has not been assigned a number and still appears as “bip-????.mediawiki.” Even so, the conversation quickly escaped the confines of GitHub and the dev mailing list, morphing into a full-blown culture clash on X.

An ‘Attack On Bitcoin’?

At the core is a claim familiar from the inscription/Ordinals fights of 2023–2024: Bitcoin is “a monetary network,” not “an arbitrary data transfer protocol.” Supporters argue that constraining arbitrary payloads is about protocol purpose, not adjudicating content. In the draft’s discussion, the author stresses that limiting data avoids turning Bitcoin into “a content moderation system,” and contends that permissive data storage risks centralization and stigma if the chain becomes known as a venue for illegal material. “Node operators shouldn’t have to defend hosting arbitrary data just to participate in a monetary network,” one passage reads.

The draft also floats a

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Author: Jake Simmons