Replying to Avatar Control-Plane Capital

My argument is not that soft forks are impossible and have never happened.

My argument is that BIP-444 is different from prior soft forks (e.g. Taproot).

So I guess your question is how is BIP-444 different.

I think 1/3rd of the article is me explaining this, but I guess I didn't do a good job because you're like the 4th person asking.

So, how is BIP-444 different.

1) Its objective is social/legal containment. BIP-444 is a defensive restriction meant to choke non-monetary data (inscriptions/large payloads) after Core v30 blew the doors open on policy defaults. Its stated rationale is preventing legal blowback on nodes/miners for illicit on-chain content.

Other soft forks like Taproot (BIP-341/342) were focused on capability "expansion", not legality.

BIP-444 arrived fast, with “legal/moral risk if you reject it” language. That framing is unprecedented.

That “legal shield via consensus” move hasn’t been tried before.

Prior BIPs sold on technical safety or clear capability gains. 444’s “reject = legal/moral risk” posture is governance by liability fear. That’s a new control lever in Bitcoin’s social layer.

Some other differences below (less important than the fact that the soft fork is liability-motivated).

2) BIP-444 is a time-boxed consensus rule (≈1-year).

Historical soft forks (SegWit/Taproot) made permanent rule changes.

BIP-444 proposes a temporary, one-year soft-fork restriction — a freeze window — arguably to “buy time” to redesign data rules. That time-boxing is novel in Bitcoin governance.

That's not the main point though (the prevention of legal blowback is).

3) Reversing a policy swing via consensus.

Core v30 policy raised OP_RETURN defaults to ~100 KB and allowed multiple OP_RETURNs; that was mempool policy, not consensus.

BIP-444 tries to “re-tighten” at the consensus layer (e.g., 83-byte OP_RETURN; ~34-byte caps elsewhere), flipping a relay policy dispute into a consensus rule — a heavier hammer than prior practice.

So the point is not BIP-444 = all bad. The point is that it has its pros and cons.
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Tauri 1mo ago

> BIP-444 arrived fast, with “legal/moral risk if you reject it” language. That framing is unprecedented.

All legal language has been stripped from the second draft of the proposal.

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Control-Plane Capital 1mo ago

1) Removing the "legal/moral risk" wording is mostly an optics patch.

You can soften the text but the capability + precedent remain: a temporary consensus rule to gate behavior “for safety”.

Lawmakers don’t need the scary paragraph preserved — they only need the fact that Bitcoin shipped (or even seriously advanced) a safety-gating soft fork to later say: “Bitcoin has already limited X for safety; extend it to Y.”

2) The political cover persists - press, blogs, and mailing-list archives have already captured the “moral/legal” framing. You can delete lines in the BIP PR; you can’t delete the discourse trail.

3) Once “emergency soft fork for safety” is on the menu, subsequent asks are just parameter shifts: AI-safety provenance, public-health blocks, carbon budgets, foreign-influence filters, sanctioned payload exclusion, non-KYC path restrictions.

4) Even rejection is usable.

- Fail path: “You refused — now we must legislate and impose liability on nodes.”

- Pass path: “You acknowledged duty of care — make it permanent and expand scope.”

So the proposal’s substance — temporary consensus gating — remains the same goal whether or not the word “legal” appears. Multiple outlets already framed it as averting legal exposure for node operators. The record is fixed.

The text edit just removes an easy talking-point for critics; it doesn’t close the door that’s been opened.

The real move was normalizing consensus-level behavioral gating “for safety”.

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Tauri 1mo ago

That’s all true, but what are the alternatives? For all we know, the shady changes in Core 30 might’ve been pushed by government hands, BlackRock, or some proxy of theirs. Most of the Knots crowd were glad they didn’t need to force a user-activated fork just to keep policy sane. But defaults rule, and the majority kept running obviously compromised code — along with the moral and legal mess that implies. At this point, fixing it through a consensus change seems like the only real move left, even if it’s not ideal. Doing nothing just tells the controllers we can’t self-regulate and that we’re waiting for the big boys to “save” us.