BIP-110, the proposed one-year soft fork that would have restricted how much arbitrary data Bitcoin transactions could carry, effectively died this month after its minority chain split off on August 8, produced just two blocks in roughly eight hours, and stalled at an estimated 0.15% of the network's hashpower — far short of what it needed to survive, let alone displace the main chain.
The proposal, formally the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, would have capped most new output scripts at 34 bytes, limited OP_RETURN data fields to 83 bytes, and restricted data pushes to 256 bytes for about a year — rules aimed squarely at Ordinals inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, and Runes without naming them directly. Its mandatory signaling window opened on August 7 at block 961,632, and the chain split the following day when it became clear the 55% miner threshold needed for activation was never within reach. Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, who published a widely shared 110-point essay opposing the proposal in July, used the stall to make a broader point about Bitcoin's design: anyone can fork Bitcoin, he wrote, but without security, utility, capital, and users, a fork is irrelevant. At its current hashrate, Saylor estimated the minority chain would need roughly 25 years to reach its first difficulty adjustment.
What made BIP-110 notable wasn't the specific byte limits — it was who showed up to fight over them. Blockstream co-founder Adam Back, whose Hashcash system is cited directly in Satoshi Nakamoto's original whitepaper, argued the proposal's real danger wasn't Ordinals spam but the precedent of a consensus change that could invalidate valid, fee-paying transactions based on their content. "Bitcoin respectfully says no to what you want," he wrote, telling supporters their only legitimate path forward was to fork away on their own terms — which, functionally, is exactly what happened. Saylor's objection ran on the same axis: turning a spam dispute into a content-based consensus rule sets a precedent more dangerous than the inscriptions it targets, regardless of whether those inscriptions are a good use of blockspace.
Blockhead flagged this dispute as it escalated in July, describing it as Bitcoin's quiet civil war reaching a breaking point as creator Dathon Ohm's proposal collided with a 55% activation threshold that historical upgrades like SegWit and Taproot cleared with more than 90% support. That piece also noted a detail that turned out to be decisive: Bitcoin Core v30, the reference software the majority of the network actually runs, moved in the opposite direction by raising data limits rather than restricting them — a signal that the most widely deployed implementation and the proposed fork disagreed on the core variable well before the signaling window even opened.
BIP-110's failure doesn't mean Bitcoin has endorsed Ordinals as a good use of blockspace — Saylor, Back, and other critics were explicit that their objection was structural, not aesthetic. What it does confirm is a governance principle that's now been tested rather than just argued about: consensus changes that restrict specific transaction content, rather than transaction validity generally, don't survive contact with Bitcoin's actual economic majority, no matter how prominent the sponsors pushing them. The underlying tension over what belongs on Bitcoin's blockspace hasn't gone away. It just lost this round decisively enough that the next attempt will need a very different argument.
