“If RDTS is successful, the sky is the limit,” adds Luke Dashjr.
Dashjr’s statements are his personal opinion and not the consensus of the bitcoiner community.
On May 16, 2026, an X user posted a seemingly simple question: His friend is 42 years old and says he is too old to invest all his money in bitcoin. Are you right?
Luke Dashjra Bitcoin developer, responded. But he did not talk about age or investment horizons. He spoke about the fate of the network: «It is a bet at this point. If RDTS fails, Bitcoin is over. If successful, the sky is the limit.
Dashjr went further: “Keep in mind that if Bitcoin fails, the entire economy will face really very bad times. Fiat is doomed anyway. There is no such thing as ‘safe savings’ right now. “Bitcoin is our last good chance.” And at the bottom, a disclaimer: “This is not financial advice.”
The statement It has weight because Dashjr is not just any commentator. He is a historical contributor to the protocol, maintainer of the Bitcoin Knots client and one of the main promoters of the proposal that he himself points out as decisive: RDTS.
What is the RDTS proposal in Bitcoin?
RDTS is the acronym for Reduced Data Temporary Softfork (reduced data temporary soft fork). Formally registered as BIP-110 in the official Bitcoin repository, the proposal—as CriptoNoticias has explained— seeks to limit the amount of arbitrary data that can be included in a Bitcoin transaction.
To understand it in simple terms: Bitcoin’s technical structure allows additional information, beyond the strictly monetary, to be attached to each transaction.
In recent years, that capacity has been used to post images, text and even entire files directly to the network. It is the phenomenon known as Ordinals and inscriptions.
This increases block size, makes it more expensive to operate a node and allows someone to register illegal material —including child sexual abuse material—permanently.
The Bitcoin Core v30 update, released in 2025, increased what Dashjr considers a problem by expanding the limit of the OP_RETURN field — a technical field where data is embedded — to 100,000 bytes.
RDTS proposes to reverse that through a soft fork– A rule change that tightens transaction validation without breaking compatibility with nodes that are not updated. The restriction would be temporary, approximately one year, while a definitive long-term solution is designed.
Current status of the BIP-110 proposal
The proposal was originally submitted to the BIP repository in October 2025 by a contributor identified as “Dathon Ohm.” Dashjr expressed support but denied writing it. The project is currently in draft status (draft), the earliest phase of the formal process.
It is worth clarifying that the implementation is included in Bitcoin Knots, an alternative client to the Bitcoin Core software, maintained by Dashjr himself.
Bitcoin Knots v29.3 (released in May 2026) already incorporates RDTS and asks for explicit confirmation from the user before activating it.
Online support is still marginal: reports from February 2026 they indicated that around 583 nodes supported the proposal, approximately 2.38% of the total network. For a soft fork to activate without conflict, a significantly higher critical mass is required.
The proposal contemplates two activation routes: one programmed when block height 965,664 is reached and another “reactive”, which would allow the network to be reorganized if illegal material was detected in a block. This second route was widely criticized by the community as technically dangerous.
The proposal generated resistance on multiple fronts. Martin Habovštiak, a Slovak Bitcoin developer, managed to upload an image in TIFF format that contradicts the Bitcoin Knots proposal.
Dashjr, in his recent publication on No threats. Without catastrophism.
Regarding the controversy over blocking content in Bitcoin, he was more direct: “Imagine thinking that it is controversial to ban child pornography.”
Would it really be the end of Bitcoin or is Dashjr exaggerating?
Dashjr’s claim – that Bitcoin would end if RDTS fails – is a personal position that may be legitimate within the technical debate, but it is his interpretation, not a consensus. AND, Considering the history of Bitcoin, it seems unlikely that his prediction will come true.
Bitcoin has survived scalability wars, forks, adverse regulations, and multiple governance crises. History suggests that the network has considerable resilience and that Consensus mechanisms tend to stop changes that do not generate broad support.
What is true is that the RDTS debate touches on real and unresolved tension– Whether Bitcoin should be exclusively a monetary network or whether it should tolerate non-financial uses of its infrastructure. That question has no single technical answer, and it is unlikely to have one anytime soon.