BIP-110 Hits the Mute Button on $BTC Spam — Miners Hit Mute on BIP-110 Instead

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 entered its mandatory-signaling phase at block 961,632 on Saturday, with miner support reaching just 51 of the preceding 2,016 blocks, or 2.53%, far below the 55% threshold required for early activation, according to the BIP-110 monitor. Starting at that block, nodes enforcing BIP-110 began rejecting blocks that did not set version bit 4, while ordinary Bitcoin nodes continued accepting both signaling and non-signaling blocks. A minority BIP-110 branch subsequently emerged but stalled at block 961,633 after producing only two blocks, according to Ocean records. By 10:19 am UTC on Sunday, the non-enforcing chain had advanced to 961,721, widening the gap to 88 blocks, with the BIP-110 branch's latest block mined about 12 hours earlier. Pseudonymous mining group Roughnecks produced the branch's first two blocks using Ocean's Decentralized Alternative Templates for Universal Mining (DATUM) protocol.

Written by pseudonymous developer Dathon Ohm, BIP-110 proposes consensus restrictions lasting roughly one year that would limit most new output scripts to 34 bytes, cap OP_RETURN outputs at 83 bytes, restrict certain data pushes and witness elements to 256 bytes, and temporarily limit several Taproot features, while exempting unspent transaction outputs created before activation. Supporters said the restrictions would discourage inscriptions and other non-monetary data that increase storage and bandwidth costs for node operators. Critics, including Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor and Blockstream CEO Adam Back, have argued that the proposal could divide Bitcoin and cause nodes to reject transactions permitted under the network's existing rules. Saylor said he shared the proposal's objectives but argued that its approach threatened Bitcoin's neutral rules and consensus, while Back warned that the consensus-level change could damage Bitcoin's credibility and potentially make certain unspent transaction outputs unspendable.

The proposal's deployment schedule sets blocks 961,632 through 963,647 as the mandatory-signaling window, with block 963,648 marking the beginning of its locked-in state and block 965,664, expected in about four weeks' time, as the point when its transaction restrictions would take effect. The enforcing branch must mine through the remainder of the 2,016-block adjustment period before its difficulty can adjust, making progress slow without substantially more hashpower, and BIP-110 proponents have framed the effort as a user-activated soft fork modeled on the 2017 BIP-148 activation of SegWit. On Aug. 1, Bitcoin developer Chris Guida rebased preliminary code for a proof-of-work change originally written by Bitcoin Knots maintainer Luke Dashjr, describing it as a contingency if miners opposed BIP-110, though no activation date has been set.