Sunday afternoon, an anonymous account with no previous history (named “Dathon Ohm”) sent an email to the Bitcoin Development mailing list with a link to PR #2017, a new soft fork proposal by the anonymous poster to implement transaction filters at Bitcoin’s consensus level. 

With that email, the multi-year debate between two Bitcoin camps–the “monetary maximalists” and the “network maximalists”–erupted into chaos.

A Bitcoin softfork is back on the table.

“...it has become necessary to move forward on luke-jr's ML proposal to temporarily limit arbitrary data at the consensus level,” the anonymous account wrote. 

The so-called “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork” proposes a change that would allow the Bitcoin network to filter certain transactions at the consensus level instead of the relay (or mempool) level.

It’s a soft fork proposal similar to ideas floated by Ocean CEO, Bitcoin Core developer, and leading Bitcoin NFT critic Luke Dashjr.

The proposal does not technically have a BIP number–which helps Bitcoin’s development team keep track of various proposals–but Dashjr has said he would give it number 444, despite the large blowback on various Bitcoin forums. Dashjr is one of 6 BIP editors.

Click below to get the not-to-technical breakdown of Bitcoin’s latest softfork drama 👇️ 

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