A brand new enchancment proposal for Bitcoin (BIP), known as a “short-term mushy fork to scale back knowledge,” suggests briefly modifying the community’s consensus guidelines to limit the inclusion of metadata (textual content, photos, and so on.) embedded in transactions.
A mushy fork is a sort of replace that introduces new guidelines suitable with the earlier ones and that solely require the consensus of part of the contributors.
On this case, the target is to mitigate the unfold of transactions with non-monetary knowledge, which many customers contemplate a type of “spam” or perhaps a doable channel to retailer unlawful content material in Bitcoin.
The initiative’s repository was printed on October 24 by an nameless developer below the pseudonym Dathon Ohm.
This nameless collaborator additionally attributed by way of the Bitcoin Dev Listing (mailing record of Bitcoin builders, the place technical proposals and protocol updates are mentioned) the authorship of the BIP to Luke Dashrwell-known maintainer of the Bitcoin Knots consumer and one of many predominant critics of Bitcoin Core.
The motivation behind the proposed change
The textual content of the proposal warns in regards to the implications of the latest launch of Bitcoin Core v30, which elevated the allowed discipline measurement OP_RETURN in transactions as much as 100,000 kilobytes (kb).
That area can now embed massive volumes of non-financial info, together with textual content or photos.
The principle concern is that if a transaction comprises information with unlawful materials, Bitcoin node operators (who should validate and retailer all transactions) may face authorized or moral dangers by preserving that content material.
How would this BIP work in Bitcoin?
The proposed BIP introduces short-term limits to the scale of sure knowledge inside transactions.
Particularly, the BIP establishes that the brand new guidelines would govern from block 934,864 (estimated for February 1, 2026) to dam 987,424, scheduled for February 1, 2027.
Throughout that interval, transactions and blocks should adjust to some further restrictions. Amongst them:
- Override new ones scripts output (scriptPubKeys or public key script) that exceed 34 bytes, besides people who start with OP_RETURN, during which case As much as 83 bytes are allowed.
- Reject any knowledge instruction with payloads better than 256 bytes, besides in circumstances outlined by BIP-16.
Moreover, the mushy fork It contemplates two activation strategies. The primary, proactive, can be based mostly on an activation scheduled for early 2026, so as to implement the foundations with out conflicts if no problematic knowledge seems on the chain.
The second, reactive, would enable a retroactive reorganization of the chain to invalidate any blocks containing unlawful content material and activate the brand new guidelines instantly.
Lastly, the creator admits that not like most mushy forks, this one may trigger a brief chain cut upsince it might suggest rejecting already mined blocks.
Nevertheless, he argues that this consequence can be needed to forestall illicit materials from being completely recorded.
