A Bitcoin developer says the creators of the Taproot upgrade failed to anticipate the “social attack surface” that allowed Ordinals, BRC-20 tokens, and other nonfinancial transactions to clog the network with spam.
“Taproot carried significant trolling value, especially since it was the upgrade many Bitcoiners had pinned their hopes on,” Bitcoin Core developer Jimmy Song said in a video on X on Sunday, adding:
“The increase in the social attack surface of this upgrade wasn’t accounted for at all, let alone considered.”
Song — who previously labeled Ordinals a “fiat scam” — argued that Taproot has fallen short of expectations, failing to deliver on its promised privacy and security benefits.
He highlighted Schnorr signatures and Script Path Spend features, which were promoted as a more efficient alternative to multisig. In theory, they could enable setups like three out of five trusted contacts helping to recover a Bitcoin key. In practice, however, Song said they turned out to be even more complex, requiring more signing rounds than traditional multisig.
“The poor user experience basically made it a non-starter,” he added. Taproot, introduced by Jonas Nick, Tim Ruffing, A.J. Townes, and other Bitcoin Core developers in November 2021, was built on a concept first proposed by Gregory Maxwell in January 2018.
Song’s remarks come as divisions deepen among Bitcoiners over which types of transactions should be permitted on the network.
Figures like Adam Back, Dennis Porter, and Luke Dashjr — echoing Song’s stance — argue that Bitcoin should stay true to Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, focused solely on fixing money.
On the other side, leaders such as Bitcoin Ordinals advocate “Leonidas” have embraced Taproot, leveraging it to build Ordinals and Runes applications. This camp maintains that Bitcoin should remain neutral and avoid censoring any type of transaction.
The debate has fueled tensions between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots. In June, more than 30 Bitcoin Core developers voted to lift the 80-byte OP_RETURN limit, enabling larger amounts of data such as images, audio, video, and documents to be stored onchain. But concerns that Bitcoin Core — the dominant node software — might walk back the change have driven many to adopt Bitcoin Knots instead.
Since March 2024, Bitcoin Knots nodes have surged from 67 to over 7,112, now making up nearly 28% of the network. Earlier this month, Leonidas even warned that the Ordinals community may consider forking Bitcoin Core if developers attempt to roll back the update and restrict nonfinancial transactions like Ordinals and Runes.
Despite his criticism, Song hasn’t completely written off Taproot, suggesting it could still prove useful for Bitcoin in the future.
“Taproot can, of course, redeem itself, maybe Ark ultimately decentralizes mining, maybe BitVM creates way more Bitcoin demand. But so far, Taproot has not lived up to the cost users paid to get it.”
Leonidas: Ordinals and Runes bolster Bitcoin’s security
Leonidas has argued that Ordinals and Runes have added more than $500 million in transaction fees to the Bitcoin network, helping to reinforce its security at a time when the block subsidy continues to halve roughly every four years.
Still, this fee stream has proven inconsistent. According to Dune Analytics, daily fees from Ordinals inscriptions in 2025 have fluctuated between $3,060 and $537,400. Even the top figure is only a fraction of the record $9.99 million miners earned from Ordinals activity on Dec. 16, 2023.
