Martin Habovštiak has demonstrated that it is possible to store a 66-kilobyte TIFF image on the Bitcoin blockchain as a single transaction, without using the opcodes that BIP-110 aims to restrict.
Slovak developer Martin Habovštiak, maintainer of the Rust Bitcoin library, published on February 28, a technical proof of concept embedding a 66-kilobyte TIFF image directly into the Bitcoin blockchain as a single contiguous transaction. The demonstration calls into question some of the claims made by supporters of BIP-110, the temporary soft fork proposal that seeks to limit arbitrary data storage on the network.
The transaction is publicly verifiable on the blockchain and can be decoded from raw hex format into a valid TIFF file, viewable with any standard image software. The image depicts Luke Dashjr, Bitcoin Knots developer and primary advocate of BIP-110, in tears. Habovštiak announced the project on X, attaching a detailed guide with step-by-step instructions for independent verification using any full Bitcoin node.
The most technically significant aspect of the demonstration concerns what the transaction does not contain: no OP_RETURN opcode, no use of Taproot (the transaction is based on SegWit v0), and no OP_IF instruction. These are precisely the main vectors that BIP-110 aims to restrict. The absence of all these elements, according to Habovštiak, proves that the proposed restrictions can be circumvented without resorting to any of them.
BIP-110, originally introduced as BIP-444 in October 2025, proposes a one-year temporary soft fork. The proposal includes an 83-byte limit on OP_RETURN outputs, a maximum of 256 bytes for individual data pushes, and restrictions on other scripting features that allow large amounts of data to be stored. The proposal was introduced after the release of Bitcoin Core v30 had effectively removed previous limits on OP_RETURN outputs. According to data from The Bitcoin Portal, 8.8% of network nodes already support BIP-110, implemented exclusively through Bitcoin Knots, whose node count has grown approximately tenfold since the beginning of 2025.
Habovštiak also produced a BIP-110-compliant version of the transaction, tested on Bitcoin Knots’ regtest environment. The compliant version would be larger than the original – an argument the developer uses to contend that BIP-110’s restrictions would actually increase the total amount of data stored on the blockchain, rather than reducing it. Luke Dashjr disputed the characterization of the transaction as “contiguous,” writing on X: “His spam is not and does not contain a contiguous image.”
Habovštiak stated that the project was a one-off initiative and that he will not release the source code, with the explicit goal of not fueling a new wave of NFT-like activity on Bitcoin. The developer described himself as an opponent of blockchain spam, but justified the demonstration as a necessity to refute claims he considers false: “There is something I hate far more than spam: falsehoods. I have tried to argue in the past, I showed a contiguous image encoded to fit within the witness, and yet Knots supporters keep repeating the same things.”
