Why Bitcoin’s BIP-110 refuses to die despite near-zero miner support

Bitcoin is approaching a rare test this weekend, with a small group of nodes is preparing to reject blocks produced by almost all of the network’s miners.

The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-110, a controversial proposal to temporarily restrict how much non-payment data can be stored on the Bitcoin blockchain, approaches its long-planned mandatory signalling period, expected to be sometime on Aug. 9. The actual activation, if it takes place, would follow at block 965,664, estimated around four weeks later.

Its ordinary 55% approval threshold is already out of reach.

Nodes are computers running Bitcoin software that independently check transactions and blocks against the network’s rules, rejecting anything they consider invalid. Miners create new blocks, while nodes decide whether to accept them.

On paper, BIP-110 looks finished, with public signaling from mining pools negligible at under 3% and only two days to go until the Bitcoin network reaches the height at which

If BIP-110 was a referendum, “landslide” wouldn’t begin to describe the scale of its defeat.

Its proponents argue that Bitcoin’s software means anyone is free to adopt a different version of the code and enforce whatever rules they believe define the network.

Dathon Ohm, the proposal’s pseudonymous author, declared, “Bitcoiners are about to show the world, once again, what happens when the plebs stand up against large, corrupt institutions who are telling us Bitcoin isn’t money and our nodes belong to them,” in a thread on X on Thursday.

Rhetoric aside, the thread gave instructions to miners planning on enforcing the BIP-110 rulebook, advising them to upgrade to Bitcoin Knots (the primary software carrying and enforcing BIP-110), warning that Bitcoin Core (the network’s principal software that represents the current implementation of Bitcoin’s rules) should not be run as it would become “insecure.”

BIP-110 is designed to temporarily tighten Bitcoin’s consensus rules to make inscription techniques used by Ordinals and Runes impractical. Its supports argue that use of the network for non-financial data consume block spacer, make it more expensive to run and undermine Bitcoin’s purpose of digital money.

Critics have pointed to the lack of miner support as evidence that the proposal is effectively dead. Its supporters reject that premise.

BIP-110’s proponents argue that miners do not govern Bitcoin – they merely produce the blocks. Nodes decide whether those blocks comply with rules. User-activates soft forks (UASFs) are designed around that principle, allowing node operators to begin enforcing new rules from a predetermined block height regardless of miner support.

This philosophy underpinned the activation of SegWit in 2017 in the face of miner resistance. SegWit enabled the separation of digital signature from transaction data, ironically paving the way for Ordinals and Runes, which BIP-110 seeks to restrict.

When Bitcoin reaches block 961,632, nodes running BIP-110 software will begin rejecting blocks that fail to signal, even if they’re accepted by the wider network. If some miners continue producing signaling blocks while the rest mine as usual, two branches could emerge — and the BIP-110 branch would likely have only a small fraction of Bitcoin’s hash rate at the outset.

Whether this outcome would favor BIP-110 remains to be seen but many observers see that as unlikely. Nevertheless, some bitcoin-only exchanges plan to temporarily pause deposits and withdrawals around the activation window. Such precautions reflect the reality that Bitcoin consensus is not produced by hash rate alone, nor by node counts in isolation, but by coordination among miners, exchanges, wallet providers and so on.

For what its worth, BIP-110 appears to have scant support among influential figures away from the mining sector, with the likes of Michael Saylor and Adam Back both voicing their opposition.

BIP-110 opponents argue that Bitcoin’s greatest strength is its exceptionally high threshold for changing consensus rules and contend that the network’s fee market should determine how block space is used.

Its supporters see things differently. They argue that BIP-110 is not rewriting Bitcoin as much as restoring it, maintaining that users have both the right and responsibility to reject software changes they believe alter the network’s intended behaviour.

Whether BIP-110 succeeds or fails, beyond the passing of its activation point on Aug. 9, its significance is likely to reverberate beyond any debate over Ordinals or “spam.”

BIP-110’s next test will therefore be measurable in blocks, not arguments. If enforcing nodes reject the dominant chain on Sunday, the question becomes whether enough miners, exchanges and users follow them to keep a second branch alive.