Saylor Slams BIP 110 as Bitcoin Fork Deadline Nears

The Strategy chairman posted the statement at 08:32 GMT. It added to a multi-day series of public criticism. Meanwhile, the proposal heads toward a mandatory signaling window in early August.

What BIP 110 Would Change

BIP 110 Bitcoin, also called the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, proposes seven temporary consensus rules. A pseudonymous developer known as Dathon Ohm wrote it, with credited input from Luke Dashjr.

The rules would apply for roughly one year, or 52,416 blocks. They target new outputs that store large data. Examples include scriptPubKeys over 34 bytes and witness items over 256 bytes.

Other rules reach deeper into Taproot. The proposal would reject witness stacks that carry an annex and control blocks over 257 bytes. It would also invalidate tapscripts that contain OP_SUCCESS or execute OP_IF and OP_NOTIF.

Crucially, the limits only touch new coins created after activation. Existing UTXOs stay permanently exempt, so old transactions keep their validity. The author published the full text on GitHub, where it now carries Complete status.

According to its abstract, the goal is to correct “distorted incentives caused by standardizing support for arbitrary data.” In short, the author wants Bitcoin to “do one thing, and do it well.”

The idea is not new. Dathon Ohm first posted the draft to the bitcoin-dev list in October 2025, initially numbered BIP-444. Editors gave it its current number that December, and signaling began soon after.

Why Saylor Opposes BIP 110

Saylor frames the fight as a matter of principle, not spam. He argues that policing how people use Bitcoin betrays the network’s neutrality.

“The impulse to change Bitcoin’s rules merely to prevent others from using Bitcoin in ways you disapprove of is statist,” Saylor wrote. He added that the change “would impose monetary purity by fiat.”

Earlier, on July 11, he made a similar case. “There are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam,” he posted. He warned that the fork would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions.

He is not alone. Blockstream chief Adam Back and analyst Jameson Lopp have also rejected the proposal, according to coverage from CoinDesk. Lopp reportedly called it reckless.

Miners Have Not Signaled Support

So far, the numbers look grim for the proposal. BIP 110 uses a modified BIP-9 deployment. It needs 55% of blocks to signal, or 1,109 out of every 2,016.

Instead, miner signaling has stayed near zero. Across periods it has held at roughly 0 to 1.24%. The little support that exists sits in the Ocean mining pool.

Node support also clusters narrowly. Most of it runs on Bitcoin Knots, the stricter node software that Luke Dashjr maintains. Far fewer signals come from the widely used Bitcoin Core.

Because support is so thin, the August window looks unlikely to trigger lock-in. As a result, many observers expect the rules to expire quietly rather than activate.

Consensus Rules Versus Relay Policy

The debate turns on a key distinction. Consensus rules define what the whole network accepts as valid. Relay policy only decides what one node passes along.

Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots already differ on data policy today. Yet they share the same consensus, so the chain does not split. The proposal would instead lift selected limits to the consensus layer.

That shift is what worries critics. A soft fork makes upgraded nodes reject non-compliant blocks. So a divided hashrate could, in theory, create a temporary chain split. Supporters counter that data use burdens node operators in ways fees do not fully cover.

The rules target techniques that Ordinals and inscriptions made popular. Since 2023, those methods have packed images and tokens into Taproot witness space. To test the limits, developer Peter Todd embedded the full BIP text inside a compliant transaction during list discussion.

Developers have raised further concerns on the Delving Bitcoin forum. Some question whether the rules would even work, given easy workarounds. Others warn about confiscation edge cases and the precedent of filtering by values.

What Happens Before the August Deadline

For now, the market has shrugged. Bitcoin traded in a roughly $62,000 to $65,000 range through mid-July. No clear price move ties to Saylor’s post or the wider debate.

The next milestone is the mandatory signaling window. It opens around block 961,632 in early August. If miners stay quiet, lock-in fails and the rules head toward expiry without activation.

The stakes reach beyond this single vote. Analysts compare the clash to the block-size wars and earlier fights over data on Bitcoin. Each time, the network weighed narrow use against open, permissionless access.

Still, the fight has surfaced a deeper split over what Bitcoin is for. Watch the signaling monitor at bip110.org in the coming weeks to see whether opposition or activation wins out. This article is not financial advice.