Long-term Bitcoin developer, BIP-54, in collaboration with Matt Corallo, stated that he believes there is an 80% chance that “Great Consensus Cleanup” will become the next Bitcoin soft fork – a fix for issues that are widely recognized as problematic.

This upgrade was first proposed in 2019, under the names of Great Consensus Cleanup ( BIP-54 ), with the aim of fixing "various issues" in the Bitcoin consensus design. These issues included long-standing vulnerabilities ranging from the network difficulty adjustment mechanism to denial-of-service attack vectors between miners.

Corallo recently stated during a visit to MARA Foundation TV: "We are aware that there is a long list of issues that indeed need to be addressed. These problems are real and could have a negative impact on Bitcoin, but they are not of the 'the sky is falling' nature."

Although the official timeline for the advancement of BIP has not yet been determined, Corallo believes that there is an 80% chance that Great Consensus Cleanup will be adopted by the network next. In a conversation with Isabel Foxen Duke, the person in charge of MARA Foundation, he also mentioned that this is a practical exercise for Bitcoin developers who have not yet experienced a soft fork.

Corallo said that the core of BIP-54 is to "fix some issues that everyone agrees are problematic," and it targets four specific vulnerabilities:

• Poison blocks:If miners want to gain a relative competitive advantage in the short term, they can mine a block that is specially constructed, taking advantage of performance bottlenecks to deliberately slow down the verification speed of other nodes.
• Time warp bugs :There is a vulnerability in Bitcoin's bi-weekly difficulty adjustment window, allowing miners with the majority of computing power to manipulate block timestamps and artificially speed up the creation of new blocks.
• Merkle malleability:Since a 64-byte transaction happens to have the same data size as an internal node of the Merkle tree, attackers could theoretically forge proofs to trick lightweight clients into accepting fraudulent transactions.
• Duplicate coinbase transactions :Historical design quirks once allowed for duplicate transactions ID, and this issue may reappear in future block heights, creating vulnerabilities that could potentially overwrite existing coins or disrupt the ledger accounting.

However, not everyone views this type of soft fork, which is mainly for maintenance purposes, as a major positive development. LayerTwo Labs, co-founder and CEO of Paul Sztorc, stated on X that the possible activation of BIP-54 “is a bit disappointing, as it’s just a maintenance-oriented fork that doesn’t bring any significant changes.”

During a survey of developers at the TABconf held in Atlanta, it was pointed out that those considered "the best and most intelligent" in the Bitcoin community generally believed that Great Consensus Cleanup would most likely become the next soft fork for Bitcoin. However, the earliest estimate was for September 2027, while most people are anticipating 2028 or even later.

After the activation on Taproot in 2021, the Bitcoin community has been stuck in a deadlock regarding protocol changes for many years. This friction is often summarized as " ossification (rigidity)," and broader protocol changes such as OP_CAT ( BIP-347 ) and OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY ( BIP-119 ) have also struggled to gain unanimous agreement from the entire ecosystem.

Corallo indicates that soft forks have always required overcoming technical obstacles. However, recently he has observed that frictions at the political and social levels have also become important.

The Bitcoin community spent months discussing how to activate Taproot, with debates focusing on miner signal thresholds and the mandatory user "flag day" scheme. Corallo believes that BIP-54 can establish a deployment paradigm for future soft forks.

He said, "In each of the recent soft forks, there have been many dramatic debates surrounding the activation mechanism. So I hope that by going through these debates once with a soft fork, we can then replicate and reuse this process to resolve some of the disputes in advance for future soft forks."

In this sense, BIP-54 is not only about proving that Bitcoin can still reach a consensus on technological upgrades, but also about demonstrating that it can achieve agreement at the social level as well.