Saylor and Back Reject Bitcoin’s BIP-110 Fork as Deadline Nears With Almost No Miner Support

Strategy founder Michael Saylor and Blockstream co-founder Adam Back have come out against BIP-110, a proposal to temporarily restrict non-financial data such as NFTs and similar data on the network, weeks before an activation deadline it is on track to miss entirely.

Saylor said in a Saturday post that there are “110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam” and wrote that the measure “turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions,” calling the precedent the real danger. “We should save our energy for threats that really matter,” he concluded.

Back, whose Hashcash work is cited in the Bitcoin white paper, said in his own post that “Bitcoin respectfully says ‘no’ to what you want,” telling the proposal’s backers their recourse is to group together and fork away, but that “bitcoin won’t be joining it.” He added, “the way you propose to achieve your ideas, hard-conflict with free cypherpunk permissionless money.”

Formally titled the Reduced Data Temporary Soft Fork, BIP-110 is an attempt to block the paths that Ordinals, inscriptions, and token schemes like BRC-20s use to put images and metadata onchain.

The way it would accomplish that is to tighten, for one year, the ways Bitcoin transactions can carry data, capping the OP_RETURN data field, blocking most arbitrary data chunks above 256 bytes, and limiting script formats used mainly for storage. Supporters say the limits keep Bitcoin focused on payments and ease the load on node operators.

The fight is the latest front in a long-running clash over what Bitcoin’s block space is for, the same tension behind the rift between the Bitcoin Core and Knots node software and Bitcoin Core’s move to expand OP_RETURN capacity in its version 30 release.

What sets BIP-110 apart is how little support it has. It proposes to be adopted by a user-activated soft fork, in which nodes enforce a rule by rejecting blocks by miners that do not follow it. Rather than the typical 95% signaling threshold, it proposes a 55% bar.

Even at that lower threshold, miner signaling has been hovering around 1%, despite the fact that miners have been able to signal support for the soft fork since March, according to the BIP-110 signaling monitor. Node adoption still sits in the low single digits, carried mostly by Bitcoin Knots.

Developer Jameson Lopp has called the proposal “reckless” and “doomed to fail,” warning that the low threshold raises the odds of a chain split. With the deadline set for no later than block 963,648, which is expected to be reached in early August, a rule enforced by a nominal percentage of nodes and almost no miners would not change Bitcoin for everyone. It would splinter off a minority chain.

Related Listen: Why Saylor’s ‘Inoculate’ Comment May Be a Signal He’ll Sell More Bitcoin

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