A controversial new proposal, BIP-444, seeks to restrict non-financial data on Bitcoin. Presented as a temporary security measure, it nevertheless threatens “legitimate” transactions and reignites the question of control over the protocol.
BIP-444: Protection or Danger for Bitcoin and Its Consensus?
Since the beginning of 2025, the Bitcoin community has been rocked by a debate over non-monetary data recorded on the blockchain via the OP_RETURN field in its transactions. While Bitcoin Core developers have chosen to raise the former 80-byte limit to 100,000 bytes, Luke Dashjr, creator of the competing client Bitcoin Knots, strongly opposes this, viewing such data as spam and an attack on Bitcoin. Today, more than 20% of nodes now use his client.
In late September, leaked messages reported by The Rage revealed that Dashjr was considering a Bitcoin hard fork to retroactively remove content deemed illicit. He proposed the creation of a trusted multisignature committee tasked with censoring blocks containing this data by replacing them with cryptographic proofs (zero-knowledge proofs). This proposal was not initially taken seriously.
Now, with pull request 2017—which will likely become BIP-444, a new Bitcoin Improvement Proposal—Luke Dashjr hopes to protect the Bitcoin blockchain from non-monetary data entries.
Pull request 2017
Unlike his initial idea for a hard fork, BIP-444 now proposes a temporary one-year soft fork aimed at restricting what is considered abusive use of the blockchain.
Specifically, this would involve reinstating technical limits that were lifted in version 30.0 of Bitcoin Core:
- Reducing OP_RETURN to 83 bytes;
- Limiting OP_PUSHDATA to 256 bytes;
- Restricting the size of ScriptPubKeys to 34 bytes.
This BIP is presented as an emergency and temporary measure, until the community develops a more sustainable response, whether through more refined rules or solutions outside the consensus mechanism.
The main concern expressed by Dashjr and his supporters is to preserve Bitcoin’s legal neutrality by preventing illicit content from posing a legal risk to node operators.
A soft fork that would likely end Bitcoin’s neutrality
Although Luke Dashjr’s initial motivations for proposing this soft fork are commendable, the mechanisms he wishes to implement could have major consequences for the blockchain’s operation, as well as its neutrality. In fact, the proposal has been compared on several occasions to the European ChatControl regulation.
In practice, BIP-444 could result in the freezing of certain funds by rendering UTXOs unspendable for the duration of the soft fork, which—although presented as temporary—could extend indefinitely if no lasting consensus emerges.
These UTXOs would be deemed invalid because they do not comply with the new rules introduced by the update.
One of the major changes is the deactivation of the OP_IF opcode in Tapscript, preventing the execution of conditional scripts. This would impact “legitimate” use cases such as inheritance mechanisms (conditional timelocks) or multisigs used by certain advanced Bitcoin wallets.
Furthermore, the restriction on Taproot checkpoint block sizes makes certain “deep spends” in complex Merkle trees impossible, permanently blocking access to the funds in question.
Supporters of BIP-444 believe that users will have time to move their assets before activation via a “User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF),” and dismiss criticism as FUD. But opponents denounce this as a form of protocol-level censorship, likely to cause a chaotic fork and lock up dormant funds.
For now, the proposal has not yet been formally accepted as an official BIP, but it is already stirring debate about Bitcoin’s decentralization.
Ironically, the pull request that could turn this text into BIP-444 is numbered 2017—an unintended reference to the year of the Bitcoin Cash fork, which was marked by another ideological battle over block size.
