Bitcoin's most contentious protocol debate in years is heading toward a resolution by default — not because consensus was reached, but because almost no one is enforcing it.
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BIP-110 faces August deadline with near-zero miner support as Saylor and Back oppose
BIP-110, a proposal to restrict data-heavy transactions on Bitcoin for one year, will hit a voluntary lock-in deadline in early August with miner signaling at 1.3% and opposition from two of the ecosystem's most influential figures.
"BIP 110 turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions. That precedent is the danger," Michael Saylor, co-founder of Strategy, the world's largest publicly traded corporate Bitcoin holder, said in a July 11 post on X.
The proposal targets OP_RETURN outputs and script formats used by Ordinals inscriptions and token schemes, reverting OP_RETURN to its older size limit and blocking arbitrary data chunks above 256 bytes. Miner signaling peaked at roughly 1% during period 475 and has since dropped to zero, according to the public BIP-110 signaling monitor. No major mining pool has backed the change. Among nodes, adoption sits in the low single digits, concentrated almost entirely in Bitcoin Knots, a minority alternative to Bitcoin Core.
The voluntary lock-in deadline falls at block 961,542 in early August, with activation projected around September. If the 55% threshold is reached only among BIP-110 nodes, the result would not be a network-wide rule change but a minority chain split — one that most of the network would not follow. Ordinals activity has also declined sharply, with fewer than 10,000 daily inscriptions recorded over the past month, down from more than 400,000 at the peak in August 2023, reducing the practical urgency even among those who support the proposal's goals.
Why Saylor and Back Said No
Blockstream co-founder Adam Back went further, calling BIP-110 a "quest to police other people" that conflicts with the permissionless foundation Bitcoin was built on. Both figures have been critical of Ordinals in the past, making their opposition notable: they are not defending Ordinals activity so much as arguing that BIP-110 is the wrong tool for addressing it.
The proposal was introduced in December 2025 by pseudonymous developer Dathon Ohm with backing from Ocean protocol founder Luke Dashjr. It uses a user-activated soft fork mechanism that lets nodes enforce a new rule without miner approval but still sets a 55% miner-signaling threshold, lower than the traditional 95% required for standard soft forks. Even at that reduced bar, support is effectively absent.
What Happens Next
The current signaling period runs through block 959,615. If BIP-110 fails to reach the threshold, the proposal effectively dies — at least in its current form. The broader debate over what constitutes valid use of Bitcoin blockspace, however, is unlikely to disappear. Bitcoin's open-access design means anyone willing to pay fees can write to the ledger, a property that BIP-110's backers sought to curtail for data-heavy transactions. The backlash has reaffirmed that changing those rules requires a level of consensus the proposal never achieved.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
