BIP-110 faces 1% miner support as Saylor, Back lead opposition

MicroStrategy's Michael Saylor and Blockstream's Adam Back publicly opposed BIP-110, a proposed one-year ban on Ordinals inscriptions that has drawn less than 1% miner support since December 2025.

"There are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam," Saylor said in a post on X, calling the proposal a self-inflicted protocol risk that could invalidate ordinary transactions.

Back described BIP-110 as a "quest to police other people," arguing Bitcoin's decentralized ethos is incompatible with imposing one developer's preferences on the network. The proposal, backed by Ocean protocol founder Luke Dashjr, requires 55% of miners to signal support — a threshold that has never been approached, with backing peaking at 0.79% since its December 2025 introduction.

The activation window opens in early August, when nodes running Dashjr's Bitcoin Knots software — which powered about a fifth of public nodes during 2025's spam fight — plan to reject blocks that withhold support. Back dismissed the deadline as the road to a "minority altcoin," while Nakamoto CEO David Bailey warned Wall Street has "no idea how Bitcoin governance works."

The 2014 Precedent Returns

The dispute has revived a 12-year-old controversy. Bailey resurfaced a 2014 incident in which Dashjr added Bitcoin address blacklists to the Gentoo Linux package he maintained, blocking payments to gambling services such as SatoshiDice by default. Node operators discovered the change only when transactions failed. Dashjr later reversed the default, made it optional, and apologized; Bitcoin Core never adopted the blacklist.

"The record disqualifies Dashjr from steering Bitcoin as the BIP-110 fight intensifies," Bailey wrote on X. "His judgement cannot be trusted to run a trillion-dollar asset as sole maintainer."

The Fork Risk and a $1.3 Trillion Question

BIP-110 targets Ordinals inscriptions — images and text embedded on Bitcoin that proponents call spam. The proposal echoes the 2017 SegWit upgrade, which users forced through by rejecting non-supportive blocks. But that push carried broad market backing; BIP-110 does not.

Bitcoin's market value sits near $1.3 trillion. Critics say that valuation should not hinge on one developer's preferences, even as Dashjr warns Bitcoin "fails" if the proposal fails. Ordinals activity has collapsed to fewer than 10,000 daily inscriptions, down from more than 400,000 at its August 2023 peak, according to Dune Analytics.

"If the network ever split, which side would the cash-settled futures on the CME exchange treat as the real Bitcoin?" Bailey asked. "Whether TradFi likes it or not, they're locked in the insane asylum with all of us."

The 2014 fight now stands in for a bigger question: who gets to shape Bitcoin.

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