The technical debate over scalability and the use of block space in Bitcoin has added a new and ironic chapter. Martin Habovštiak, a Slovak developer and maintainer of the Rust Bitcoin library, demonstrated that the BIP-110 (formerly known as BIP-444) improvement proposal is ineffective for its main purpose: preventing arbitrary data, such as images and content, from being stored on the Bitcoin blockchain. To prove his point, Habovštiak made a transaction that included a 66-kilobyte TIFF image. The file, which can be decoded from the hexadecimal of the transaction and viewed in any standard software, shows developer Luke Dashjr, main promoter of the BIP-110 improvement proposal and staunch critic of the Ordinals, in a crying gesture. The action not only has a satirical charge, but rather exposes technical vulnerabilities in the proposed restrictions.
The BIP-110 proposal, promoted by Dashjr through the Bitcoin Knots client, seeks to establish a temporary one-year soft fork. Your rules would limit OP_RETURN outputs to 83 bytes and restrict the size of individual messages to 256 bytes. The objective is to discourage what this sector considers «spam» or «harmful and illegal» content on the network of the main digital currency. However, Habovštiak’s proof of concept deliberately avoided the vectors that BIP-110 attempts to block. The transaction did not use OP_RETURN opcodes, depend on Taproot, or employ OP_IF statements. Using SegWit v0, the developer demonstrated that it is possible to embed data contiguously without violating the proposed new rules.
This is the satirical image of Dashjr that was uploaded to the Bitcoin network. Source: Martin Habovštiak. Habovštiak even claimed to have created a version of the transaction that is fully compatible with the Bitcoin Knots registry environment. According to the developer, this version turned out to be heavier than the original, suggesting that the BIP-110’s restrictions could, paradoxically, increase the total amount of data stored on the network by forcing less efficient encoding methods. The motivation behind this technical “trolling,” according to Habovštiak, is not to promote NFTs in Bitcoin, but to combat what he considers “falsehoods” by Knots proponents. “There is something I hate much more than spam: lies,” he declared, pointing out that arguments about the impossibility of uploading contiguous data under BIP-110 are incorrect. For his part, Dashjr has downplayed the finding, questioning on social networks the «contiguous» nature of the data uploaded by the Slovak. Contiguity refers to the way arbitrary data bytes (such as an entire image) are stored in the on-chain transaction. In a contiguous transaction, the bytes of the file are stored uninterruptedly and sequentially on the blockchain, without jumps, fragmentations or interleaved bytes from other parts of the transaction (such as metadata, scripts, pubkeys or separators).
Activation prospects
Despite the demonstration of its ineffectiveness in stopping images, there is confusion about the future of the BIP-110. On prediction platforms like beta.predyx, only 3% of users believe that the proposal will be activated, as reported by BitcoinDynamic. However, technical analysts such as ‘StackItDeep’ maintain that the design of the proposal does not contemplate a «failed state» and that It will be activated automatically when reaching block 965,664.
This confrontation highlights the persistent tension between those who see Bitcoin strictly as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system and those who defend the freedom to use the block space for any transaction that pays the fees required by the market.
