BIP-110 rift widens as Saylor, Sahay clash over 0% miner support

Bitcoin's BIP-110 rift deepened July 14 as Saylor called the proposal dangerous and Arch's Himanshu Sahay urged a fact-based review.

"BIP-110 turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions. That precedent is the danger," Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy, said on X.

Sahay, co-founder and CTO of Arch, responded by arguing that Bitcoin's rules validate transactions regardless of intent. The proposal — a one-year softfork targeting Ordinals inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens — has drawn support from roughly 22 percent to 23 percent of reachable nodes running Bitcoin Knots, according to node data. Yet miner signaling has never topped 0.79 percent since December 2025, with zero percent support in the current difficulty period, SimpleMining data shows.

The standoff carries implications beyond the proposal itself. With mandatory signaling set to begin around block 961,632 — expected approximately Aug. 7 — BIP-110 faces a deadline it was never going to clear. If enforced by a minority of nodes without economic majority support, the mechanism risks producing a minority chain with limited economic value rather than a network-wide rule change.

The Saylor-Sahay Exchange Exposes a Deeper Divide

Saylor's July 11 post was the opening salvo. He argued that the greater threat was not Ordinals-related spam but the precedent of changing consensus rules to police transaction content. Blockstream co-founder Adam Back posted a lengthy rebuttal the same day, writing that Bitcoin "respectfully says no to what you want" and that supporters who remain unconvinced retain the option to fork away — but "bitcoin won't be joining it."

Sahay's response on July 14 took a different tack. Rather than defending BIP-110's technical merits, he argued that Bitcoin's protocol validates rules, not motives — a framing that sidesteps the content-policing critique while implicitly acknowledging that the proposal's governance mechanism, not its technical design, is the real point of contention.

Why Zero Percent Miner Support Matters

BIP-110's activation mechanism requires 55 percent miner signaling — far below Bitcoin's historical 95 percent standard for soft forks. Even that reduced bar proved unreachable. Data from SimpleMining shows approximately 38 signaling blocks out of more than 9,000 mined since May 1, or roughly 0.42 percent of total hashrate. The first signaling block was mined by Barefoot Mining through the Ocean pool on March 1. No major mining pool joined in the months that followed.

The proposal's supporters had hoped to replicate the 2017 SegWit activation, where a user-activated soft fork succeeded because the economic majority — exchanges, wallet providers, and users — aligned behind the upgrade. BIP-110 never built that alignment. Mining pools earn fees from every transaction regardless of content, and Ordinals-related transactions have generated real fee revenue since 2023. Institutional investors showed little appetite for a governance battle with uncertain outcomes.

The underlying philosophical dispute — over what Bitcoin's blockspace is actually for — does not resolve with BIP-110's failure. Luke Dashjr, who helped author the proposal, has argued that Bitcoin faces grave risk from non-monetary data accumulation and that long-term storage costs will rise. Those concerns remain, even if the specific mechanism proposed to address them could not clear Bitcoin's governance bar.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.