BTC news: Bitcoin’s BIP 110 fork deadline nears with miner support at zero
The BIP 110 proposal would cap arbitrary data on Bitcoin for a year, but Saylor, Adam Back and others say turning a spam dispute into a consensus fight could create a bigger risk than the spam itself.
Jul 12, 2026, 5:49 a.m.
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Summary
An infamous proposal to purge non-financial data from the Bitcoin blockchain is heading toward a hard deadline in early August, and the initial support it has gathered from miners is less than 1% so far – a signal of outsized opposition despite the immense social chatter around the topic.
BIP-110, formally titled the Reduced Data Temporary Soft Fork, is basically a fight over what Bitcoin block space is for.
Bitcoin transactions can carry money and extra data. An OP_RETURN section is the obvious “note field” for small bits of data within transactions, and data pushes are another route – where users can place larger chunks of raw data inside Bitcoin script or witness data. Ordinals, inscriptions and some token schemes use those paths to put images, text or token metadata onchain.
BIP-110 would temporarily tighten those paths for one year. It would cap OP_RETURN at the old small size, block most arbitrary data chunks above 256 bytes, and restrict some script formats used mainly for data storage.
Supporters say this keeps Bitcoin focused on payments and lowers node burden, but critics think it turns a policy fight into a consensus rule and tells users which transactions are “acceptable.”
Two of Bitcoin’s most influential figures came out against it on Saturday. Strategy founder Michael Saylor posted that “there are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam,” arguing the proposal “turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions.” The precedent, he wrote, is the real danger.
Adam Back, the Blockstream co-founder whose hashcash design is cited in the bitcoin white paper, made a similar case at greater length, addressed to the newcomers backing the proposal.
“Bitcoin respectfully says no to what you want,” he said, adding that their real recourse, if unconvinced, is to group together and fork away, but that “bitcoin won’t be joining it.”
The support data shows what the broader market really thinks. BIP 110 does not rely on the usual path of overwhelming miner approval, but uses a user-activated soft fork, a mechanism in which nodes enforce a rule whether or not miners agree, set to a 55% miner-signaling threshold rather than the traditional 95%.
Backing is absent even at that significantly lower bar.
Miner signaling has never risen above about 1% in any period and stands at zero in the current one, with no major mining pool behind it, according to the BIP 110 signaling monitor.
Among the nodes that store and relay the chain, adoption sits in the low single digits, carried almost entirely by Bitcoin Knots, an alternative to the dominant Bitcoin Core software.
The deadline arrives regardless. The current signaling period runs from block 957,600 to 959,615, and a voluntary lock-in deadline falls at block 961,542 in the following period, expected in early August.
Nodes running BIP 110 software would then begin rejecting any block that does not signal support, with activation projected near September. In practice, a rule enforced by a few percent of nodes and almost no miners does not change Bitcoin for everyone but would split off a minority chain.
As such, Bitcoin’s resistance to change is not written down anywhere, but is the product of thousands of independent operators who each have to opt in as a means of consensus.
The underlying spam concern is real. Blocks have carried more non-financial data since the October change, and reasonable people see that as a drift from Bitcoin as money toward Bitcoin as a database. But Bitcoin changes only when the network agrees to run the change, and on the evidence so far, it will not run this one.
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Why it matters:
Digital assets posted a third consecutive quarter of losses in Q2 2026, the longest losing streak since the 2022 bear market, as institutional capital rotated into AI equities and Bitcoin ETFs recorded their largest quarterly outflow since launch. Our report examines what drove the divergence, where structural adoption continued regardless, and what Q3 signals to watch.