What Is BIP-110 and Why Is It Dividing the Bitcoin Community? - Decrypt

What Is BIP-110 and Why Is It Dividing the Bitcoin Community?

A proposal to change Bitcoin's consensus rules has divided developers, miners, companies, and users over how the network should evolve and who gets to decide.

The dispute centers around Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110, or BIP-110 . If implemented, BIP-110 would temporarily restrict several methods used to embed arbitrary data in Bitcoin transactions.

Supporters say the proposal would reduce blockchain spam and reinforce Bitcoin's role as money, while critics argue it would reject valid transactions and could split the network.

The debate has drawn reactions from Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr, Blockstream CEO Adam Back, Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, Casa Chief Security Officer Jameson Lopp, and Bitcoin advocate Samson Mow.

“There are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam. BIP 110 turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions,” Saylor wrote on X. “That precedent is the danger. We should save our energy for threats that really matter.”

Bitcoin transactions can include more than payments. They can also carry text, images, token metadata, and other information through transaction scripts and witness data.

As a soft fork, BIP-110 would tighten Bitcoin's consensus rules by limiting several techniques used to embed that data. The proposal would limit most new transaction outputs to 34 bytes, restore an 83-byte limit for OPRETURN outputs, cap certain witness elements at 256 bytes, and temporarily restrict several Taproot features commonly used for inscriptions. (Inscriptions are to Bitcoin what NFTs and other similar assets are to blockchain networks like Ethereum and Solana .)

Critics argue that BIP-110 would invalidate some transactions that are currently valid under Bitcoin's consensus rules and set a precedent for future protocol changes. In a February blog post, Jameson Lopp argued that BIP-110 would weaken two of Bitcoin's defining properties: censorship resistance and predictability.

“Bitcoin's strength lies in its censorship resistance and predictability,” Loop wrote . “BIP-110 signals that the protocol can be altered to censor subjectively ‘undesirable’ transactions, eroding its image as permissionless programmable money.”

BIP-110's mandatory signaling period begins in August, and so far, only 1% of miners have shown support for BIP-110, according to the proposal's monitoring dashboard.

Blockstream CEO Adam Back argued that Bitcoin's decentralized design prevents users from imposing their preferences on others and that its technical consensus process is intentionally resistant to change. While supporters are free to create their own fork, he wrote, "Bitcoin won't be joining it."

“Now the tough pill, which is unfortunately true,” Back wrote on X. “If you won't listen to reason, educate yourself, learn, the same radical freedom applies to you: your permissionless recourse is to club together and create a fork.”

The current dispute dates back to early 2023 with the launch of Ordinals , a protocol created by Bitcoin developer Casey Rodarmor that allows images, text, video, and other digital content to be inscribed directly onto individual satoshis , the smallest unit of Bitcoin . Ordinals use features introduced by Bitcoin's SegWit and Taproot upgrades to create NFT-like assets directly on the Bitcoin blockchain.

As Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens gained popularity, demand for Bitcoin block space increased, pushing transaction fees higher. Supporters say those fees generated additional revenue for miners and strengthened Bitcoin's long-term security.

However, critics, including Dashjr, have argued that inscriptions exploit the Bitcoin network, describing them as spam rather than legitimate financial transactions.

In an essay posted to X on Tuesday titled The Bitcoin Alliance , Samson Mow argued that Bitcoin participants should think of themselves as an alliance rather than a community, with developers, miners, companies, educators, and users each contributing to the network in different ways.

“During the Blocksize War, there was never this ‘if you're not with us, you're against us’ mentality on our side,” he wrote. “The small block camp never had to coerce anyone to join. We just all "got it" and were confident in our position.”

For reference, the Blocksize Wars (2015–2017) centered on whether Bitcoin should increase its 1 MB block size limit to process more transactions in a single block on the network. In the end, the "small block" camp won out, with "big blockers" forking off to create Bitcoin Cash in 2017 and later Bitcoin SV in 2018.

Mow wrote that he shares concerns about blockchain spam but opposes BIP-110 because he believes protocol changes require broad consensus. Mow also criticized Bitcoin Core developers for their handling of recent OPRETURN policy changes, arguing that both sides contributed to escalating the dispute.

“The way they handled the OPRETURN change was full of stupid mistakes, from banning people on GitHub to the ninja ACKs,” he wrote. “Any normal person could have predicted the reaction from the plebs. People store their time and value in Bitcoin. Anything that appears to threaten that will get people up in arms.”

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