Overview
- Over the weekend Michael Saylor published a 3,700‑word essay titled “110 reasons BIP‑110 Is a Bad Idea,” in which he says the proposal would use consensus rules to judge and block valid, fee‑paying transactions.
- BIP‑110 is a temporary one‑year soft fork that would add seven consensus limits to curb non‑financial data, including caps on new output script size (34 bytes) and OP_RETURN fields (83 bytes).
- Miner support for BIP‑110 remains extremely low, under 1% of blocks signaled, making miner‑led lock‑in unlikely today while a mandatory signaling window is scheduled for August and a latest‑path activation target sits in September.
- Critics led by Saylor and Blockstream’s Adam Back warn the proposal lowers a traditional near‑unanimous upgrade standard to 55%, which they say raises the risk of chain splits, invalidates currently valid UTXOs after activation, and would force exchanges, wallets and miners to choose which chain to follow.
- The dispute revives governance questions from the blocksize wars: supporters cite node cost and decentralization pressures from data‑heavy uses like Ordinals, while opponents say fee markets, relay policies and second‑layer solutions are better tools than changing base‑layer consensus.