🧠 BIP-444 Could Change Bitcoin Forever

Bitcoin’s oldest question is back: should the blockchain carry art, data, and memes — or just money? Plus: gold’s retreat, ETHZilla’s $40M selloff, and Solana ETFs edge toward approval.

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Cryptopolitan News
October 28, 2025 ‱ Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

Bitcoin has found itself back in the midst of a philosophical battle.

A new soft-fork proposal, BIP-444, is being drafted to prevent “non-financial” data such as Ordinals and NFTs, from gumming up Bitcoin’s blockchain. They say it will keep the network clean. Critics call it censorship.

Deep down, it comes to one simple question:

👉 Does Bitcoin need to transport memes, art and data or just money?

What BIP-444 actually proposes

Drafted by Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr, the proposal would introduce a temporary soft fork (a backwards-compatible rule change) that restricts the amount of arbitrary data in blocks.

It wouldn’t be carving out a new coin or splitting the chain, but it would prevent transactions that embed large non-payment data from being included.

Dashjr says we have to “buy time” for more long-term solutions that are better:

❝

We can do these all together in a short-term soft fork that self-expires after a year or two.

His objective: Refocus Bitcoin to be a financial settlement network, not a storage layer for inscriptions or experimental NFTs.

Why it matters

Since the beginning of 2023, Ordinals inscriptions, digital collectibles hosted directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, have skyrocketed transaction fees and block sizes to all-time highs.

  • Good for miners (they earn more) but bad if you’re a user sending regular transactions.

  • That could be fixed by BIP-444, but at a price.

  • It sets a precedent for on-chain content filtering, some devs worry, and that’s a slippery slope to centralization.

Who’s for and against it

  • For: Bitcoin Core developers who seek cleaner blocks and fewer spam transactions.

  • Against: Mining pools users who writes off Bitcoin as a neutral protocol, and not one that decides what’s “valid” data.

“It’s really a stupid idea,” said Chun Wang, cofounder of F2Pool (which has more than 10% of the Bitcoin hash rate) who added that his pool wouldn’t support BIP-444.

Adding some irony, critics Inscribed BIP-444 directly on the Ordinal itself in order to prove a point.

📚 Quick Explainers

  • Soft Fork: A backward-compatible rule change. Nodes that do not upgrade still accept new blocks as valid.

  • Ordinals: A protocol that allows users to attach any data, such as an image or text to individual satoshis, essentially making Bitcoin-native NFTs.

  • Hash Rate: A representation of the level of computational support for the network. Pools with >10% can strongly manipulate consensus.

🧠 Something to think about

More than a tech tweak, BIP-444 It’s a referendum on what kind of thing Bitcoin is:

  • Money system? → BIP-444 makes sense.

  • Digital civilization layer? → It’s censorship.

One side or the other will win, but one thing is certain:

A decade and a half after launching, Bitcoin’s longest-standing disagreements are not about price, they’re about purpose.

💡 A Look Back: When a Fork Did Double Everyone’s BTC

Back in 2017, the community split over block sizes.
That hard fork created Bitcoin Cash (BCH), a completely new chain.

Holders of BTC at the time automatically received an equal amount of BCH (1 BTC = 1 BCH) because both chains shared the same transaction history up to the split.
Exchanges later listed BCH separately, briefly valuing it near $1,000. Effectively doubling balances for anyone who held before the fork.

BIP-444, however, is not that kind of fork.
It’s a soft fork: backward-compatible, so no new coin, no duplicate balances, just new rules within the same chain.

📊 Market Watch

1ïžâƒŁ Gold finally cools off after monster run

Having spiked to all-time record highs above $4,400/oz, gold has retreated back below $4,000 as the long-expected consolidation sets in and not a collapse.

Technical indicators are triggering what chart analysts say is a short-term sell signal, and many expect the pause to extend into 2026 before another leg up.

2ïžâƒŁ ETHZilla has sold $40 million worth of Ether in order to fund share buybacks

Ethereum treasury company ETHZilla (NASDAQ: ETHZ) raised $40M worth of ETH to buy back shares announced a $250M stock repurchase plan in an effort to close the gap between its share price and NAV.

3ïžâƒŁ Litecoin, HBAR and Solana ETFs surge towards approval

Final 8-A registrations were submitted by Canary Capital for its Litecoin (LTCC) and Hedera (HBR) ETFs, with Bitwise also receiving NYSE approval for its Solana Staking ETF.

 đŸ“‰ Chart our analyst is watching

Qualcomm stock jumped 23 percent on Monday on the announcement of its AI200 and AI250 accelerator chips, the company’s first full step into data center hardware, and a direct challenge to Nvidia and AMD.

These chips won’t power smartphones.

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