1) Removing the "legal/moral risk" wording is mostly an optics patch. You can soften the text but the capability + precedent remain: a temporary consensus rule to gate behavior “for safety”. Lawmakers don’t need the scary paragraph preserved — they only need the fact that Bitcoin shipped (or even seriously advanced) a safety-gating soft fork to later say: “Bitcoin has already limited X for safety; extend it to Y.” 2) The political cover persists - press, blogs, and mailing-list archives have already captured the “moral/legal” framing. You can delete lines in the BIP PR; you can’t delete the discourse trail. 3) Once “emergency soft fork for safety” is on the menu, subsequent asks are just parameter shifts: AI-safety provenance, public-health blocks, carbon budgets, foreign-influence filters, sanctioned payload exclusion, non-KYC path restrictions. 4) Even rejection is usable. - Fail path: “You refused — now we must legislate and impose liability on nodes.” - Pass path: “You acknowledged duty of care — make it permanent and expand scope.” So the proposal’s substance — temporary consensus gating — remains the same goal whether or not the word “legal” appears. Multiple outlets already framed it as averting legal exposure for node operators. The record is fixed. The text edit just removes an easy talking-point for critics; it doesn’t close the door that’s been opened. The real move was normalizing consensus-level behavioral gating “for safety”.