Bitcoin Core developer Jimmy Song has said that Taproot failed to deliver on its promised security and privacy benefits, opening the door to Ordinals spam.
Jimmy Song: Taproot was a failed upgrade for Bitcoin
One of Bitcoin Core’s most prominent developers, Jimmy Song, has criticized the Taproot upgrade, saying that it failed to deliver on its promises and opened the network to unwanted transactions.
In a video on X, he emphasized that rather than improving privacy and security, Taproot created a “social attack surface” that was used to launch Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens. According to Song, the developers failed to take into account the risk of mass trolling and spam.
“The promised benefits of Taproot never materialized. Schnorr signatures and Script Paths Spend turned out to be more complicated than multi-signatures, and the poor UX made them virtually unusable,” he noted.
Bitcoin Community Split
The Taproot criticism has intensified an old debate in the Bitcoin community: whether the network should remain a purely financial system or allow non-financial data.
Song, along with Adam Beck and Luke Dashjir, insists that Bitcoin should remain “money, not a media platform.” At the same time, Ordinals leader Leonidas believes that any transaction has a right to exist, and emphasizes that Ordinals and Runes have already brought miners over $500 million in fees.
Dune Analytics data shows that in 2025, daily fees from Ordinals will range from $3,000 to $537,000, while the record in 2023 reached $9.99 million.
The Rise of Bitcoin Knots
The disagreements led to a rapid transition of nodes from Bitcoin Core to Bitcoin Knots: if in March 2024 there were 67, then today there are over 7,100 – almost 28% of the network.
Leonidas even warned that if Core developers try to limit Ordinals and Runes, the community may go for a fork.
Does Taproot have a future?
Despite the criticism, Song does not consider Taproot a complete failure. He suggested that in the future projects such as Ark or BitVM may give the upgrade a chance to prove its usefulness.
“Taproot can still justify itself. But for now it is not worth the costs incurred by users,” the developer concluded.
