Bitcoin's BIP-110 fight is still alive, but the live signaling data shows a proposal heading into its mandatory window with almost no miner backing.
Bitcoin is closing in on one of the strangest protocol tests it has faced since SegWit. Block 961,632 opens the mandatory signaling period for BIP-110, the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, and the live BIP-110 monitor showed 0.00% signaling in the current difficulty period on July 27, with the chain at block 959,813 and about 1,818 blocks left before the window. The calendar has moved. Earlier estimates pointed to August 7, but the monitor now puts the window roughly 13 days away.
The numbers are brutal. This isn't a proposal with quiet majority support waiting to appear at the last moment. Previous coverage from GNcrypto and bitcoin.com put late-June support at about 5 exahashes per second, or roughly 0.31% of a network then near 940 EH/s. Now the current period is showing zero signaling blocks. If you're watching Bitcoin governance, that is the whole story in one figure.
BIP-110 was authored by Dathon Ohm and is listed by bips.dev as a complete consensus soft fork specification. It would temporarily restrict several ways of carrying arbitrary data in Bitcoin transactions for 52,416 blocks, roughly one year after activation. The proposal targets the methods used by Ordinals inscriptions, BRC-20 style activity and large OP_RETURN payloads, but it doesn't describe itself as an Ordinals ban. It changes consensus rules. That is a much heavier tool.
Look at the mechanism. BIP-110 uses a modified BIP-9 deployment with version bit 4, a 55% threshold, and a mandatory signaling period before the maximum activation height. During that window, nodes enforcing BIP-110 would reject blocks that don't signal readiness. If most miners keep mining ordinary Bitcoin blocks and only a small enforcing minority rejects them, you don't get a clean upgrade. You get a fork risk.
That is why the opposition matters. Coindesk reported on July 19 that Michael Saylor called BIP-110 a bad idea and argued it would damage Bitcoin's neutrality. Decrypt reported that Saylor followed with a 110-point essay against the proposal. BeInCrypto reported on July 24 that Blockstream CEO Adam Back dismissed a flip-the-bit push around BIP-110 as idiocracy, and Jameson Lopp's February analysis called the proposal reckless and doomed to fail. Those aren't casual market commentators. They are people Bitcoin readers actually know.
The Fight Is Really Over Bitcoin's Memory
The technical rules are specific. BIP-110 would invalidate new output scriptPubKeys over 34 bytes unless they use OP_RETURN, cap OP_RETURN at 83 bytes, limit certain witness and pushdata items to 256 bytes, reject undefined witness or Tapleaf versions in spends, reject Taproot annexes, limit large Taproot control blocks, and disable some Tapscript paths such as OP_SUCCESS and executed OP_IF or OP_NOTIF. That sounds dry. It isn't. Those are the pipes used by people trying to store more than simple payments on Bitcoin.
Ordinals, launched in early 2023 by Casey Rodarmor, made that conflict visible by putting images, text and token-related data directly into Bitcoin block space. Critics see that as junk competing with payments and raising costs for node operators and ordinary users. Supporters see fee-paying transactions that follow the rules - and frankly, that second point is hard to wave away when Bitcoin has always been strict about validity, not taste.
Miners have their own reason to resist BIP-110. Inscription-related activity has brought meaningful fee revenue at a time when the block subsidy keeps falling every four years. You don't need to admire every JPEG or token minted through Ordinals to understand the incentive. A miner paid to include a valid transaction is not going to rush into a consensus change that cuts off that demand.
There is another date on the same calendar. Bitcoin.com reported in June that Paul Sztorc's separate eCash hard fork targets block 964,000, with a planned 1:1 airdrop. That proposal is not BIP-110 and doesn't impose the same data limits, but it adds noise to an already crowded August. Two fork-related events near each other are exactly the kind of thing exchanges, wallets and large holders hate, because operational confusion is expensive even when the main chain survives untouched. That matters to exchanges.
The 2017 SegWit fight proved that node operators can matter when the economic majority is behind them. BIP-110 has not shown that kind of coalition. No one should confuse a countdown with consensus. If the mandatory window arrives with current-period signaling still near zero and no major exchange or wallet clearly enforcing the new rules, the likeliest result is not a victorious user-activated upgrade. It is a minority effort that either fizzles or produces a small chain few economic actors treat as Bitcoin.
The bigger argument will survive BIP-110. Bitcoin still has to decide whether its block space is only for payments or for any valid transaction someone is willing to pay for. But that decision can't be forced by pretending 0.00% miner signaling is a technical detail. It is not. It is the market saying no, at least for now.
Also read: Triple-A's $11.8 million treasury drain shows licensed crypto payments firms are no safer than anyone else • Visa built the stablecoin rails so your bank doesn't have to • Garden Finance shuts down after a $450,000 exploit hits its solver layer, not its protocol
