First Bitcoiner in Space Condemns Controversial BIP-444 as 'A Bad Idea'

Chun Wang, the co-founder of F2Pool and the first-ever Bitcoiner to fund and travel to space, has publicly slammed the controversial Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP-444), calling it “a bad idea.” Wang, who gained significant attention for commanding the SpaceX Fram2 mission earlier this year, expressed his disappointment on social media, stating he felt “sad” that some developers are moving “further and further in the wrong direction.” His comments add significant weight to the growing dissent against the proposal, which has ignited one of the fiercest governance debates in the Bitcoin community in years.

The Controversial BIP-444 Explained

BIP-444, championed by long-time Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr, proposes a temporary one-year soft fork designed to significantly limit the inclusion of arbitrary, non-financial data in Bitcoin transactions. The primary motivation, according to its authors, is to address the potential for illegal content, such as child abuse material, to be permanently stored on the blockchain. Proponents argue that hosting such material could expose individual node operators to legal liability, thereby creating an “existential threat” to Bitcoin’s decentralized model by forcing honest users to stop validating the chain.

A Clash Over Core Principles

The proposal’s technical restrictions—which would, for instance, limit the size of OP_RETURN outputs and effectively prevent new Ordinals inscriptions—are widely viewed by critics as protocol-level censorship. More contentiously, the proposal’s language warns that rejecting the soft fork could subject users to “legal or moral consequences.” Prominent figures, including Galaxy’s head of firm research, Alex Thorn, have described the proposal as “incredibly stupid” and an “attack on Bitcoin,” arguing that it undermines the network’s core principle of permissionless and censorship-resistant neutrality. The controversy highlights a fundamental ideological split: whether Bitcoin is a neutral, immutable settlement layer, or a system that must actively mitigate real-world legal and moral exposure.