BIP-110, formally titled the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, is heading toward its August 2026 mandatory signaling window with miner support at 0.31% of total network hashrate — roughly 5 EH/s out of approximately 940 EH/s. The proposal, which would restrict non-monetary data in Bitcoin transact...
"BIP 110 turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions. That precedent is the danger." — Michael Saylor, Executive Chairman, Strategy (MicroStrategy)
BIP-110, formally titled the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, is heading toward its August 2026 mandatory signaling window with miner support at 0.31% of total network hashrate — roughly 5 EH/s out of approximately 940 EH/s. The proposal, which would restrict non-monetary data in Bitcoin transactions for one year, needs 55% miner signaling to activate. It has never exceeded 1%.
The proposal has drawn public opposition from Strategy founder Michael Saylor, Blockstream CEO Adam Back, and BIP editor Mark Erhardt, who called it "a misguided and unusually careless softfork proposal." Bitcoin Core has not endorsed it and no implementation has been merged into the reference client. Only Bitcoin Knots, a minority client maintained by developer Luke Dashjr, supports the rules with manual configuration.
What began as a technical dispute over Ordinals inscriptions and blockspace allocation has become a stress test of Bitcoin's governance model — one the proposal appears to have failed decisively, with implications for how future consensus changes are evaluated.
Published on December 5, 2025, under the pseudonym "Dathon Ohm" — with Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr credited for the original draft and advisory role — BIP-110 introduces seven temporary consensus rules designed to restrict non-financial data on Bitcoin's base layer:
All rules would expire after approximately 52,416 blocks — roughly one year. UTXOs created before activation are grandfathered. The stated purpose: preserve Bitcoin as a "sound money" network by excluding images, tokens, and arbitrary data embedded through Ordinals, BRC-20, and Runes protocols.
BIP-110 uses a user-activated soft fork (UASF) mechanism with a modified signaling threshold:
| Parameter | BIP-110 | Traditional Soft Fork | |---|---|---| | Miner signaling threshold | 55% | 95% | | Signaling method | Version bit 4 | Version bits | | Early lock-in block | 961,542 | Varies | | Mandatory signaling start | ~Block 961,632 | N/A | | Projected activation | ~Block 965,664 (~Sept 1, 2026) | Varies | | Duration | ~52,416 blocks (~1 year) | Permanent |
The 55% threshold is substantially below the 95% convention used in prior Bitcoin soft forks such as SegWit. Proponents argue the lower bar reflects urgency. Critics say it invites network fragmentation.
The mandatory signaling window is expected to open between August 7-15, 2026. At that point, nodes running BIP-110-enforcing software (primarily Bitcoin Knots) would begin rejecting blocks that fail to signal.
As of mid-July 2026, BIP-110 has effectively no mining industry support:
According to BGeometrics tracking data, support has ranged between 0.1% and 0.7% across most measurement periods. The proposal requires 1,109 signaling blocks per 2,016-block difficulty period to achieve lock-in — approximately 110 per day for two weeks.
The economic argument against BIP-110 centers on fee revenue. Data-bearing transactions pay fees like any other. Restricting them removes demand from fee markets at a time when Bitcoin's block subsidy is declining.
Key data points:
Saylor's position is explicit: suppressing fee-paying transactions weakens miner security incentives. With block subsidies halving every four years, inscription-based fee demand is one of the few demonstrated sources of organic transaction fee growth.
Michael Saylor (Strategy, 843,775 BTC treasury): Published what he called "110 reasons" against BIP-110 on July 19, 2026. Central thesis: "The proposed cure is more dangerous than the condition. BIP 110 would use consensus to narrow valid activity, constrain future options, complicate deployment, and establish a precedent it cannot later erase." Saylor argues Bitcoin "cannot read intent" and that distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable transaction types sets a precedent for future censorship of privacy tools, corporate applications, or any other disfavored use case. His proposed alternative: market-based fees and relay policies, not consensus changes.
Adam Back (Blockstream CEO): Described BIP-110 as a "literal downgrade" and called consensus-level content filtering antithetical to Bitcoin's design. Told BIP-110 proponents to "group together and fork away" if they want different rules.
Mark Erhardt (Bitcoin Core BIP editor): Called it "a misguided and unusually careless softfork proposal." Stressed that assigning the BIP number was procedural, not an endorsement.
Jameson Lopp (Casa co-founder): Opposed the proposal, emphasizing Bitcoin's value as a "dependable anchor for other systems" — a role undermined by subjective content filtering.
Peter Todd (Bitcoin developer): Demonstrated the proposal's limitations by embedding the full BIP-110 text into transactions that would comply with the new rules — illustrating that determined users can circumvent content restrictions.
The BIP-110 debate is a direct product of the Ordinals protocol, launched in January 2023. Ordinals enabled the inscription of arbitrary data — images, text, JSON — into individual satoshis using Taproot's script-path spending. This spawned BRC-20 tokens, Runes, and a broader ecosystem of non-monetary Bitcoin applications.
At peak activity in August 2023, daily inscriptions exceeded 400,000. Activity has since declined significantly. Proponents of BIP-110 argue this decline undermines the urgency for the proposal. Opponents argue it proves the market self-regulates without consensus intervention.
The maximum theoretical data capacity per block is 4 MB under current SegWit rules. At full utilization, this adds approximately 210 GB per year to the blockchain. Full nodes currently require approximately 600+ GB of storage for the complete chain history, making the incremental cost of inscription data a measurable but manageable burden for operators.
The primary risk vector is not activation — which appears virtually impossible at current support levels — but the behavior of BIP-110-enforcing nodes during the mandatory signaling window.
If a small number of nodes running Bitcoin Knots with BIP-110 rules enabled begin rejecting non-signaling blocks after the mandatory window opens, those nodes would diverge from the main chain. The practical impact would be limited given the node count (~583), but it creates edge cases for users relying on those nodes for transaction validation.
Bitcoin Core developer warnings have been direct: users should verify which client software their nodes run before the August window opens. A Bitcoin Core developer has warned users to be cautious with BTC transfers as the deadline approaches.
The 55% activation threshold, rather than the standard 95%, amplifies governance concerns. Even if miner support hypothetically reached the threshold, 45% of hashrate would be producing blocks that a significant minority of nodes would reject — a recipe for chain fragmentation.
BIP-110's failure carries three significant governance lessons:
1. The 95% threshold serves a purpose. Previous Bitcoin soft forks required near-universal miner agreement precisely to prevent the fragmentation risks BIP-110 introduced by lowering the bar to 55%. The market's rejection of the lower threshold suggests broad consensus that the high bar is a feature, not a bug.
2. Content-neutral consensus is valued. The unified opposition from figures spanning Bitcoin's ideological spectrum — from maximalist Saylor to cypherpunk Back to institutional-facing Lopp — indicates that subjective content filtering at the consensus layer crosses a line the ecosystem is unwilling to cross. Fee markets, mempool policies, and relay rules are the accepted mechanisms for managing blockspace demand.
3. Governance-as-designed worked. As Bitfinex's analysis noted, the episode demonstrates that "even proposals framed as defending the network cannot easily change its core rules without broad agreement." For institutional allocators, this is a data point supporting Bitcoin's resistance to arbitrary rule changes — a property that underpins its value proposition as a neutral settlement layer.
BIP-110 will almost certainly expire without activating. Its mandatory signaling window opens in early August 2026 with support at a fraction of a percent, 175x below the required threshold. No major mining pool, no reference client, and no prominent Bitcoin figure has endorsed it.
The proposal's significance lies not in what it would have done — restrict non-monetary data for one year — but in what its failure reveals about Bitcoin's governance. The network rejected content-based transaction filtering at every level: miners, developers, node operators, and large holders. The mechanism for managing blockspace demand remains the fee market, not consensus rules.
For the broader Web3 ecosystem, BIP-110's trajectory provides a case study in how decentralized governance handles contentious proposals. The outcome was not predetermined by any single actor. It emerged from the aggregated decisions of thousands of independent participants — each evaluating whether the proposal created or destroyed economic value. The answer, measured in hashrate, was unambiguous.