Bitcoin's Civil War Over JPEGs Has a New Plot Twist 🖼️

A proposal to curb non-financial data on Bitcoin has stalled with miners, while Ordinals developers unveiled a workaround they say will keep inscriptions live regardless of the rule's fate.

BIP-110 would cap each transaction's extra data field at 256 bytes for one year, breaking the storage method inscriptions use to embed images and text on-chain, with old coins unaffected. Its author, writing under the pen name Dathon Ohm, credits Bitcoin Knots maintainer Luke Dashjr for the first draft, and the rule is designed to switch off automatically after 12 months. Activation does not require a miner majority; instead, BIP-110 software would reject unflagged blocks starting in early August, risking a chain split that Blockstream CEO Adam Back has flagged and that MicroStrategy's Michael Saylor called a self-inflicted risk.

As of June 30, the public monitor at bip110.org counted just three flagged blocks out of 2,016, under 1%, with the best two-week stretch reaching 0.79% in mid-June and signaling support never crossing 1% since voting opened in December 2025. Dashjr framed the stakes on Thursday, writing, "If BIP110 fails, Bitcoin fails with it. I am not interested in any CBDC, much less an unregulated CBDC pretending to be decentralised," referring to government-issued digital currencies.

On July 2, Ordinals developer lifofifoX published a fix that splits files into small allowed pieces rather than the format BIP-110 targets, and Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor approved it the same day, posting on GitHub, "Looks good to me! Let's wait until BIP-110 activates to merge this." A counter-update filed to Bitcoin Knots argues the new format slips past the size checks because the software does not recognize it, leaving the dispute over whether $BTC should process only money or anything users pay for still unresolved.