What is BIP-110? Bitcoin's fight over what its blockchain is for

A proposal called BIP-110 would temporarily block certain kinds of non-financial data — like the images and text behind Ordinals “inscriptions” — from being stored on Bitcoin's blockchain. It faces an early-August deadline, and so far almost no miners support it. Two of Bitcoin's best-known advocates, Strategy's Michael Saylor and Blockstream's Adam Back, have publicly come out against it.

The fight is really about what Bitcoin's block space is for. A Bitcoin transaction can carry money, but it can also carry small amounts of extra data. Ordinals and inscriptions use those data paths to store images, text and token metadata directly on the chain. Supporters of BIP-110 see that as spam that pushes Bitcoin away from being simple digital cash; critics see it as valid, fee-paying use that no one has the right to block.

BIP-110, formally the “Reduced Data Temporary Soft Fork,” would tighten those data paths for one year: capping the small “note field” known as OP_RETURN, blocking most arbitrary data chunks above 256 bytes, and restricting script formats used mainly for storage. It was introduced in December 2025 by a pseudonymous developer with the backing of longtime Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr.

What makes the story a useful window into Bitcoin is how the network actually changes. Bitcoin has no CEO; a rule only takes effect if the people running the software choose to enforce it. BIP-110 uses a “user-activated soft fork,” asking nodes to enforce the limit even without miner approval, at a 55% signaling threshold instead of the usual 95%. Even at that lower bar, support is close to nonexistent: miner signaling has never risen above about 1% and currently sits at zero, and node adoption is in the low single digits, carried almost entirely by an alternative client called Bitcoin Knots.

The opposition is loud. Saylor posted that “there are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam,” warning that turning a spam dispute into a consensus change could invalidate ordinary, fee-paying transactions and set a dangerous precedent. Back called it a “quest to police other people,” at odds with Bitcoin's censorship-resistant ethos. Notably, Ordinals activity is already near all-time lows — under 10,000 inscriptions a day last month, down from more than 400,000 at the 2023 peak.

The takeaway for newcomers: this is how Bitcoin governance works — slowly, and only by broad voluntary agreement. A rule that almost no one runs does not create a “new Bitcoin”; at most it splits off a small, separate minority chain while the main network carries on unchanged. Watching a fight like BIP-110 is one of the clearest ways to see why Bitcoin is so resistant to change. This is information, not investment advice.