Bitcoin Boss Slams ‘Spam Police’ Soft Fork Plot! 🚨😏

Oh, Chun Wang, that cheeky co-founder of the giant Bitcoin mining pool F2Pool, is out here playing the bad cop against some wacky temporary soft fork scheme that’s supposedly gonna curb all the data spam cluttering up the Bitcoin network. Because nothing says ‘fun’ like policing digital junk. 🙄

In a Monday X post that’s probably got everyone chuckling or raging, Wang drops the mic with, “BIP-444 is a bad idea.” And just to twist the knife, he’s like, “We’re not going to soft fork anything,” temporary or not-F2Pool’s sitting this dance out, thank you very much. Bye, felicia! 💅

He even threw in a sad emoji for the devs who are apparently wandering off into the wilderness of wrongness. “Feel sad that some devs [are] moving further and further in the wrong direction.” Poor babies-maybe they need a GPS to find their way back to ‘Bitcoin is for money, duh.’ 😂

This Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-444 is basically The Contender’s soft punch at arbitrary data inclusion, which its fans call ‘spam’ but rivals see as innovation freedom. It’s dreaming of slamming the door on non-transaction data to a mere 83 bytes, keeping the blockchain from turning into a glorified junk drawer. Ambitious? Sure. Realistic? Hold my beer. 🍺

BIP-444 and its ‘raison d’être’-or is it just drama? 🤔

Looks like BIP-444 is biting back at that late September Bitcoin Core update that trashed the 80-byte cap on OP_RETURN, letting folks stash whatever data willy-nilly. Critics are screaming ‘corporate takeover!’ like it’s a Marvel plot, whining that it’ll balloon the blockchain size, jack up node costs, and hand the keys to the centralized villain lair. 🦹‍♂️

But hey, this debate’s as old as Satoshi’s first coffee order- remember, BTC started with some data embedding quirks. Proponents point out miners like F2Pool have been sneaking in non-standard transactions anyway, because why follow the rules when you can break ’em for a buck? A January 2024 review spilled the tea on that one. ☕

Crafted by the mysterious Dathon Ohm, this “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork” wants to “temporarily limit the size of data fields at the consensus level” until block 987,424-about 1.27 years of breathing room. The pitch? “Let’s remind Bitcoin it’s money, not your grandpa’s attic storage.” And once the clock ticks, poof-time to brainstorm a perm fix. Magic! ✨

What does BIP-444 even do? Spoiler: It’s a data diet. 🥗

Oh, BIP-444’s basically pulling an exorcism on Bitcoin’s data demons: banning annexes, unknown witnesses, deep Taproot trees, OP_SUCCESS* ops, and conditional branches. Stricter caps on outputs and pushes? You bet. This shuts down Ordinal NFTs, big ol’ data dumps, and fancy scripts, but keeps your simple send-money vibes intact. Simple, but is it too simple? 🙃

The BIP folks fret about compression ninja tricks embedding gross stuff-like illegal images-in under 400 bytes. One bad actor mines a nasty tx, and boom: Bitcoin’s the villain in a distribution conspiracy thriller. Yikes! 🚔

But cypherpunk Peter Todd was like, “Hold up, hacks!” He squeezed the whole BIP-444 text into a compliant transaction, proving it’s as leaky as a sieve. And the cost? Over $100 in fees-because nothing screams ‘value’ like burning cash to spam the chain. 😂

The proponent argues this makes it harder to pin liability on node ops for hosting ‘bad data’-if Bitcoin officially says ‘meh’ to arbitrary bits, maybe courts won’t call it possession. Smart? Or just legal gymnastics? 🏎️

“If Bitcoin provides an officially supported method of storing arbitrary data […] node operators could conceivably be held responsible for possession and distribution.“

Still, skeptics call it arbitrary nonsense. One X cleverpants shared commands to yank image data from the chain, showing the ‘forbidden fruit’ distinction is thinner than my patience for blockchain debates. Roll eyes forever. 😒

Read More

2025-10-28 16:40