Overview
- Two influential Bitcoin figures publicly spoke out on Sunday, with Adam Back and Michael Saylor warning that BIP 110 would censor fee-paying transactions and undermine Bitcoin’s permissionless design.
- BIP 110 is a proposed temporary soft fork that would for about one year tighten limits on non-financial data by capping OP_RETURN at the older small size, blocking most payloads above 256 bytes, and restricting some script formats.
- The proposal uses a user-activated soft-fork path that requires 55% miner signaling to lock in and sets an early August voluntary lock-in window and a projected September activation date if thresholds are met.
- Miner signaling has never exceeded about 1% and stands at zero in the current period, while node adoption is limited to a few projects such as Bitcoin Knots, making broad coordination unlikely.
- Luke Dashjr continues to press the proposal and reject calls to withdraw it, but low ecosystem support means enforcement by a minority of nodes could create a minority chain and force exchanges, wallets, and custodians to choose which chain to follow.