Saylor Hands Bitcoin a 110-Point Grief Counseling Session, BIP-110 Still at 1% Signal 📉

Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy, published a roughly 3,700-word essay on X.com over the weekend titled "110 Reasons BIP 110 Is a Bad Idea," laying out his opposition to a proposed year-long soft fork aimed at limiting non-monetary data on the Bitcoin network. The strategy executive chairman framed the post as a "case for neutral rules, hard consensus, open markets, and permissionless innovation," writing, "This article critiques the proposal, not the people behind it. I assume good faith. Bitcoin is strongest when we can disagree vigorously without mistaking allies for enemies." BIP-110, introduced in December 2025 by pseudonymous developer "Dathon Ohm," would tighten consensus rules for roughly a year to restrict the embedding techniques used for Ordinals-style inscriptions, which have periodically filled block space and lifted $BTC transaction fees since 2023.

Saylor's central argument targets the proposal's premise. "Spam is not a consensus primitive," he wrote, and a network cannot "read intent," since "you cannot tell whether the bytes represent an image, a proof, a contract, or a future application." Restricting the storage formats used for one contested use, he warned, creates a precedent that could later be applied to privacy tools, novel custody schemes, stablecoin settlement, or token systems. "The restrictions would lapse after about a year," he noted, "but the precedent does not." He labeled BIP-110 a "Bitcoin Iatrogenic Proposal," defined as one in which the treatment itself does the damage. Saylor added that he shares BIP-110 supporters' stated goals of keeping validation cheap, preserving affordable payments, and focusing $BTC on sound money, but said he rejects their remedy.

The proposal's mechanics have drawn separate fire. Saylor objected to its activation design, which lowers miner-signaling thresholds to 55% from the 95% used in earlier soft forks and removes the traditional option for a proposal to expire quietly. As of the most recent tracking period cited, period 475 covering blocks 955,584 to 957,599, only 1% of blocks signaled support. Saylor cautioned that enforcement that does not match support "can divide the network." Blockstream CEO Adam Back has separately called BIP-110 a "quest to police other people," arguing it conflicts with $BTC's cypherpunk ethos. Saylor's stance aligns him with Back, Casa's Jameson Lopp, and advocate Samson Mow, all of whom have pushed back against the proposal, while supporters include Ocean protocol co-founder Luke Dashjr and the Bitcoin Knots camp.

The signal environment has stayed well below the bar needed for activation. BIP-110 nodes running the proposal crossed 2% earlier, and as of 12 p.m. ET on Sunday, Saylor's essay had been viewed 879,000 times with 692 replies and 852 retweets. Ordinals activity itself has eased considerably, with fewer than 10,000 inscriptions recorded daily over the past month, down from a peak of more than 400,000 in August 2023, according to Dune Analytics data cited in coverage. Dashjr and other supporters have argued that Ordinals-driven bloat remains a "serious threat" to the network and that BIP-110 would not force a chain split, a concern Saylor and other opponents have disputed.

The dispute marks one of the most notable protocol-level conflicts in the $BTC community since the Blocksize Wars of 2015 to 2017, which examined whether raising the block size limit was worth risking a chain split. BIP-110's mandatory signaling window is set to open in August, with activation targeted around September 1, leaving the next several weeks to test whether support on the network can climb from its current single-digit share toward the 55% threshold required.