After BIP-110 Flops, Bitcoin’s Next Soft Fork Faces a Showdown – Bitcoin News

BIP-54, formally generally known as “Consensus Cleanup,” would make 4 slim modifications to Bitcoin’s core guidelines. The proposal is designed to shut previous weaknesses and weird edge circumstances, not add new methods to make use of Bitcoin. Its supporters say that distinction issues: That is preventive upkeep for a community now price excess of it was when a lot of its guidelines had been written.

The proposal’s authors are Antoine Poinsot, a Bitcoin Core contributor related to Chaincode Labs, and Matt Corallo, a longtime Bitcoin developer. Corallo first raised the broader thought in 2019. Poinsot revived and expanded the work in late 2023 and early 2024, and the proposal obtained its formal BIP-54 designation in April 2025. The specification was marked full in Could 2026 after testing and implementation work.

The Proposal Goals to Shut 4 Outdated Gaps

The primary repair is meant to handle a possible “timewarp” assault on Bitcoin’s mining issue. Bitcoin recalculates the problem of mining each 2,016 blocks, roughly each two weeks, to maintain block manufacturing close to one block each ten minutes. A majority of the community’s mining energy may exploit how Bitcoin measures time throughout these intervals, utilizing manipulated timestamps to make blocks seem slower to supply than they actually had been.

Over time, that would push mining issue down. In an excessive case, an attacker with majority hash price, the computing energy used to mine Bitcoin, may drive issue to its lowest setting in roughly 38 to 40 days. That might theoretically let the attacker produce blocks far quicker than regular, quickly create new cash, broaden the community’s database of unspent cash, and disrupt time-based cost contracts reminiscent of these utilized by the second layer protocol, the Lightning Community.

BIP-54 would add timestamp limits at the beginning and finish of every 2,016-block interval. The principles are supposed to block the traditional timewarp methodology and a associated variation generally known as the Murch-Zawy assault, whereas leaving peculiar mining unchanged.

BIP-54 Additionally Intends to Defend Smaller Node Operators

The second change targets “poison blocks,” legitimate blocks intentionally designed to take an unusually very long time for computer systems to confirm. Sure older Bitcoin transaction scripts can require minutes and even hours of processing on peculiar {hardware}. An attacker may use them to gradual the community, improve the prospect that miners waste work on stale blocks, and make it tougher for folks to function impartial Bitcoin nodes.

BIP-54 would cap older, pre-Segregated Witness (SegWit) transactions at 2,500 legacy signature operations. Signature operations are the cryptographic checks used to show that somebody is permitted to spend bitcoin. Regular transactions use far fewer, and SegWit and Taproot transactions wouldn’t be topic to this restrict. Supporters estimate the change may scale back the worst-case verification burden by about 40 instances in some circumstances.

The third change closes an issue in Bitcoin’s Merkle tree, the system that mixes transactions into one abstract for every block. A transaction precisely 64 bytes lengthy can resemble an inside piece of that construction. That creates a solution to forge a proof that would mislead some simplified cost verification, or SPV, wallets into accepting a transaction that was by no means confirmed.

BIP-54 would merely make 64-byte transactions invalid. These transactions have been nonstandard for years and are not often used. The proposal’s supporters argue that banning them fixes the underlying drawback extra cleanly than anticipating each mild pockets to make use of a workaround.

A Remaining Rule Might Simplify Bitcoin’s Future

The fourth change considerations coinbase transactions, the particular transactions by way of which miners obtain newly issued bitcoin and transaction charges. In Bitcoin’s early years, similar coinbase transactions appeared in multiple block, which prompted the sooner transaction’s unspent outputs to vanish. Bitcoin added checks to stop a repeat, however these checks add complexity to dam validation.

BIP-54 would require new coinbase transactions to incorporate settings tied to the block peak, or its place within the blockchain. That will assure uniqueness going ahead and will finally permit nodes to take away the older duplicate-transaction checks. The change may make validation easier and help future designs aimed toward decreasing the storage burden of working a full node.

F2pool’s Place Makes Activation Tougher

The technical case for BIP-54 has not ended the political debate. Wang Chun, co-founder of the foremost mining pool F2pool, acknowledged on Aug. 10 that he doesn’t help the proposal. He defined that F2Pool would replace its mining nodes if BIP-54 reached the required majority by way of a typical BIP-9 activation course of, however the pool is not going to sign for it beforehand.

Chun’s objection, shared again in April on X, is basically about course of and priorities. He has argued that packaging 4 modifications collectively resembles bundling unrelated measures into one invoice. He considers a number of of the dangers too distant to justify the coordination, software program upgrades and group consideration required for a tender fork, which modifications Bitcoin’s guidelines in a approach that older software program might not implement.

Supporters see bundling in another way. They argue that each consensus change carries a excessive social value, so combining a number of defensive fixes can scale back the variety of troublesome networkwide activation efforts. In addition they say Bitcoin’s rising worth provides attackers extra cause to discover weaknesses that after seemed theoretical.

BIP-110’s Collapse Provides Contemporary Warning

The controversy arrives simply after the failure of BIP-110, a separate proposal that sought briefly to limit nonfinancial information saved in Bitcoin transactions. It focused practices related to Ordinals inscriptions, massive OP_RETURN information and a few Taproot-based information storage. Its decrease activation threshold failed to draw significant miner help, and a small chain implementing the proposal stalled after producing a small handful of blocks.

That episode doesn’t make BIP-54 an identical proposal. BIP-54 doesn’t add or take away general-purpose script options, neither is it a path to covenants or OP_CAT, proposals that will broaden Bitcoin’s programmable spending choices. Nonetheless, BIP-110 demonstrated how rapidly a disputed improve can turn out to be a broader argument about who ought to resolve Bitcoin’s future.

BIP-54 is already energetic for testing on Bitcoin Inquisition, a Signet-based take a look at setting, and present Bitcoin Core releases have adopted associated coverage protections. Some mining swimming pools, together with MARA and ViaBTC, have voluntarily begun producing appropriate coinbase transactions. However formal activation parameters haven’t been set, and a mainnet vote stays open.

The subsequent query is whether or not builders, the group, companies, node operators, and miners can agree that fixing identified however not often exploited dangers is price one other hard-fork-level coordination effort. Readers ought to look ahead to a proper BIP-9 signaling proposal, extra miner readiness bulletins, and whether or not F2pool’s resistance prevents the broad help Bitcoin upgrades have historically required.