CoinDesk Podcast Network BITCOIN SEASON 2: Bitcoin’s Newest Soft Fork Is Insane
Oct 29, 2025
Rob Hamilton, a Bitcoin/node developer and contributor at AnchorWatch, dives into the controversial BIP 444 soft fork proposal. He discusses the implications of limiting OP_RETURN outputs and the push to censor inscriptions, along with legal pressures facing mining pools like F2Pool. Rob foresees potential chaos if the fork activates, highlighting the economic and game-theory dilemmas miners might face. He also explores the community's mixed reactions and predicts that this fork is likely to fail, stimulating ongoing debate within the Bitcoin ecosystem.
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520-Byte Output Cap Explained
- PortlandHODL proposed limiting outputs to 520 bytes to curb large OP_RETURN and DOS vectors.
- This change would make future enlargements a hard fork, raising upgrade concerns.
BIP 444 Targets Taproot And OP_RETURN
- PR 444 formalizes proposals to ban larger OP_RETURN and certain Taproot features to stop on-chain inscriptions.
- The draft targets OP_IF, tap leaves and reduces OP_RETURN to 84 bytes, which also breaks some advanced uses.
How Inscriptions Use Taproot Internals
- Inscription-style JPEGs exploit Taproot control blocks and Merkle paths to embed data on-chain.
- Limiting tap leaves or OP_IF would therefore prevent those encoding techniques but also break legitimate constructions.