Bitcoiners Michael Saylor, Adam Back Oppose BIP-110

The ongoing debate over a proposed temporary fork comes despite a broad downturn in Ordinals transaction activity over the last two years.

Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor and Blockstream CEO Adam Back have doubled down on their opposition to BIP-110, a proposed temporary fork to limit non-monetary transactions on the Bitcoin network.

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal-110 was introduced in December 2025 to stop nonfungible token-like Ordinals inscriptions and other arbitrary data from spamming the network and to preserve Bitcoin’s main use as a peer-to-peer cash system.

While critical of Ordinals activity, Saylor and Back fear a fork could do more harm than good to the network’s credibility. “There are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam,” Saylor said in a post to X on Saturday, adding that BIP-110 could invalidate ordinary transactions on the network.

Source: Michael Saylor

BIP-110 is one of the more notable protocol-level disputes in the Bitcoin development community since the Blocksize Wars between 2015 and 2017, when ecosystem participants debated whether it was worth risking a chain split to raise the block size limit for scalability.

BIP-110 was introduced by pseudonymous Bitcoin developer “Dathon Ohm” with the support of Ocean protocol founder Luke Dashjr.

BIP-110 won't be activated unless 55% of Bitcoin nodes validating blocks are in support of the proposal across a Bitcoin block “period.”

In the last period, period number 475 between block 955,584 and 957,599, only 1% of blocks were in support.

The dispute comes at a time when Ordinals activity is at near all-time lows, with fewer than 10,000 Ordinals inscribed into the Bitcoin blockchain on a daily basis over the last month, down from the more than 400,000 seen during its peak in August 2023.

Change in daily Ordinals inscriptions since December 2022. Source: Dune Analytics

Meanwhile, Back offered a deeper critique of BIP-110, describing it as a “quest to police other people.”

Related: Bitcoin doesn't need Ethereum-style yield, says Strategy's Michael Saylor

He said Bitcoin’s decentralization should mean “you can’t impose your views on others,” calling it incompatible with Bitcoin’s cypherpunk ethos of permissionless, censorship-resistant money.

Dashjr and other BIP-110 proponents have called Ordinals-driven bloat a "serious threat" to the network, prompting the need for an imminent fix.

They have also argued BIP-110 wouldn't cause a chain split, as many fear, while adding that the BIP-110 fork imposes a temporary one-year limit and thus wouldn’t invalidate fee-paying transactions over the long term.

Features: From Bitcoin critics to blockchain believers: The 5 biggest crypto backflips

Cointelegraph is committed to providing independent, high-quality journalism across the crypto, blockchain, AI, and fintech industries.

All news, reviews, and analyses are produced with full journalistic independence and integrity. For more details on our standards and processes, please read our Editorial Policy .

新闻图片