Saylor Slams BIP-110 as Bitcoin’s Miners Ignore the Deadline

Bitcoin miners have had eight months to weigh in on BIP-110, a proposed rule change racing toward a mandatory deadline in early August. Almost none of them have bothered. Signaling for the upgrade sits below 1% of network hashrate, even as Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor spent the past week telling anyone who would listen that the plan is dangerous.

The mismatch is the real story here. A proposal that needs the equivalent of a supermajority to become Bitcoin’s rule is stuck in the low single digits, yet the mechanism behind it does not require majority support to force a confrontation. That collision, not the philosophical argument raging on social media, is what actually determines what happens next.

A Temporary Fix With Seven New Rules

BIP-110, formally called the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, would restrict how much arbitrary, non-financial data a Bitcoin transaction can carry. It targets Ordinals inscriptions, Runes and similar protocols that critics call spam and supporters call legitimate uses of block space.

The proposal first circulated under the number BIP-444 in late 2025 before being formally reassigned. It is credited to a pseudonymous author called Dathon Ohm, with longtime Bitcoin Core contributor Luke Dashjr listed as an adviser on the original draft. Authorship itself is disputed. Bitcoin developer Greg Maxwell has alleged that the mining operation Ocean actually wrote it, a claim Dathon Ohm denies.

The restrictions cap most new outputs at 34 bytes and cover several related technical limits. The core changes include:

• Output size cap – most new transaction outputs limited to 34 bytes
• OP_RETURN allowance – a wider exception of up to 83 bytes for that specific opcode
• Data and witness limit – data pushes and witness elements capped at 256 bytes
• Witness version restriction – only well established versions like Taproot can be spent during the yearlong deployment
• Taproot construct limits – large control blocks, annexes and certain opcodes are temporarily restricted
• Grandfather clause – bitcoin sitting in outputs created before activation is permanently exempt, with no deadline to move it

The whole thing is designed to sunset. If it activates, the rules expire automatically after roughly a year, unless a follow-up proposal extends them.

Miner Support Stuck Below One Percent

Here is where the arithmetic gets uncomfortable for BIP-110’s backers. The proposal uses a modified activation process that needs 55% of miners to signal support within a single two-week difficulty period for an early lock-in, well below the traditional 95% bar Bitcoin has historically required for soft forks.

Even at that lowered bar, support has gone nowhere. As of mid-July, signaling sits between roughly 0.3% and 0.8% of the network, or about 5 exahashes per second out of a total hashrate near 940 EH/s. Node adoption of BIP-110 compatible software, mostly variants of the Bitcoin Knots client, is estimated at 2% to 8% of listening nodes.

There is a plain economic reason miners are staying away. They collect fees on every transaction that clears, including the data heavy ones BIP-110 would restrict. Ordinals, Runes and inscription traffic have been a real source of fee revenue during a year when Bitcoin’s price has fallen hard, and daily signaling block counts tracked since May show no major pool has meaningful interest in cutting that off.

Saylor Calls the Fix More Dangerous Than the Spam

Saylor published his objections on July 18 and 19 in a lengthy essay and social thread titled 110 Reasons BIP 110 Is a Bad Idea. On July 11, he had already previewed the argument on X.

There are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam.

Saylor, whose company holds one of the largest corporate Bitcoin positions in the world, argues the proposal turns a dispute over how block space gets used into a consensus change that could invalidate currently valid, fee paying transactions. That precedent, he says, is the actual danger, not the data itself.

His framework rests on four ideas he has repeated often: neutral rules, hard consensus, open markets and permissionless innovation. He has also warned BIP-110 could complicate BitVM style contracting, a newer approach that leans on flexible data embedding to run more complex operations on Bitcoin. Saylor has been careful to separate the proposal from the people behind it, writing that helped fix Bitcoin’s accidental 2013 hard fork deserves the same good faith he extends to anyone in the debate.

Who Actually Wants This Upgrade, and Why

Not every prominent Bitcoiner agrees with Saylor. Bitcoin trader Fred Krueger published a counter essay arguing BIP-110 is a good idea, a position he holds strongly enough that he has attached the proposal’s number to his own social media name. Luke Dashjr, the client maintainer most associated with filtering non-financial data, has long called Ordinals a spam bug that should be fixed at the protocol level.

On the other side, Blockstream co-founder Adam Back, whose hashcash design is cited directly in Bitcoin’s original white paper, and Jameson Lopp, the Bitcoin security expert and Casa co-founder, have both warned the activation design is reckless and technically flawed, with real risk of a chain split.

• Michael Saylor and Adam Back – say the change sets a dangerous precedent for altering consensus rules over a contested use case, calling it more dangerous than the spam it targets
• Fred Krueger and Luke Dashjr – argue non-monetary data is bloating node costs and pulling Bitcoin away from its purpose as money
• Jameson Lopp – sides against the proposal, warning that its activation parameters are reckless and poorly judged

The BIP editor who assigned the proposal its number, Mark Erhardt, reportedly described it as a misguided and unusually careless softfork proposal even as he published it, because it met the repository’s formal criteria.

Bitcoin Has Fought This War Before

This is not new territory for Bitcoin. The 2017 Blocksize Wars pitted advocates of bigger blocks against a conservative camp that eventually forced SegWit through using a User Activated Soft Fork, the same activation tool BIP-110 borrows now. That fight ended with the Bitcoin Cash network splitting away, and an informal rule that consensus changes need overwhelming buy-in to succeed without a break.

A closer precedent came just last October, when Bitcoin Core’s version 30 release lifted its old 80 byte limit on OP_RETURN data. That single change, covered at length in the clash between Peter Todd and Luke Dashjr, sent Bitcoin Knots’ node share climbing from a small base toward roughly a fifth of the network within months. It proved a determined minority could reshape client diversity even without ever becoming the majority.

BIP-110 is testing whether that same minority playbook works in reverse, restricting Bitcoin’s rules instead of loosening them, this time with a fraction of the support the 2017 fight had behind it.

What Happens at Block 961,632

The mandatory signaling window opens around that block height, projected for roughly August 7. From there through block 963,648, nodes running BIP-110 enforce the new rules regardless of what miners do, rejecting any block that fails to signal support. Lock-in must happen by that second block height if it is going to happen at all. Activation would follow at block 965,664, near September 1.

If enforcing nodes and a handful of sympathetic miners start rejecting blocks the rest of the network still considers valid, two chains briefly exist. The minority chain would almost certainly run slower and lighter, its difficulty adjusting downward as the majority chain keeps most of the hashrate and moves on largely undisturbed.

Bitcoin’s price has not been immune to the wider mood. It traded near $62,941 as of July 17, with a market capitalization of roughly $1.33 trillion, down nearly half from its October 2025 peak above $126,000. A messy, if minor, fork is not the backdrop miners or Strategy’s largest institutional holder want heading into a fragile market.

The mandatory window arrives within weeks either way. Under 1% support, against a 55% bar, is the number that decides what kind of fork this actually becomes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens to Bitcoin I already own if BIP-110 activates?

Funds sitting in outputs created before activation are permanently exempt under the proposal’s grandfather clause. Only newly created outputs after the rules take effect would face the new restrictions, and those restrictions lift automatically once the yearlong soft fork expires.

Is Bitcoin Core adopting BIP-110?

No. Bitcoin Core, the dominant client most of the network’s nodes run, has not endorsed BIP-110, and no implementation of it has been merged into Core’s codebase. Support runs almost entirely through the separate Bitcoin Knots client.

What is a User Activated Soft Fork?

A User Activated Soft Fork, or UASF, lets node operators enforce new rules on a set date regardless of whether miners have agreed to them, flipping Bitcoin’s usual miner-led upgrade path. It is the same mechanism Bitcoin used to force SegWit’s activation in 2017.

Could BIP-110 split Bitcoin into two separate networks?

Briefly, yes, if it comes to that. Enforcing nodes rejecting blocks that miners with legacy software still consider valid would create two chains, with the minority side almost certainly running slower and lighter as difficulty adjusts, similar to what happened when Bitcoin Cash broke away in 2017.

Which wallets could be affected by BIP-110’s rules?

Wallets built on advanced Taproot scripting, including some Miniscript based tools, could create transaction structures the new rules would reject. Developers have been told to update before the mandatory window opens, though bitcoin already sitting in older outputs stays unaffected regardless of wallet software.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice. Bitcoin and related protocol proposals carry real technical and price volatility risk, so consult a licensed financial adviser before acting, and figures here reflect data available as of publication.