Bitcoin: Is BIP-110 a ladder to online progress or a potential risk?

BIP-110: A controversial proposal to restrict Bitcoin's non-financial data

As debate grows over how the Bitcoin blockchain can be used, a new technology proposal has once again sparked tensions within the community. The plan, called BIP-110, aims to temporarily restrict the writing of non-financial data on the Internet to reduce what its supporters consider "spam," particularly for Ordinals, BRC-20 and Runes protocols. Some see this as a necessary evolution to maintain Bitcoin's efficiency, while others see it as a challenge to the neutrality of the protocol and its basic principles. Is BIP-110 an advancement in Bitcoin or a risk to the future of the network?

Brief overview

BIP-110 is designed to restrict non-financial data on Bitcoin, specifically Ordinals, BRC-20, and Runes. Its activation relies on user-activated soft fork (UASF), but miners support is less than 1%. Bitcoin's core development team and major network participants refused to adopt the proposal. The project sparked a major debate about Bitcoin's neutrality, decentralization and censory-resistant nature. In the absence of consensus, BIP-110 may remain just a minority initiative with no impact on the main chain.

BIP-110: Controversial Proposal to Limit Bitcoin Non-Financial Data

BIP-110 (full name "Reducing Temporary Soft Forks of Data" or RDTS for short) is a Bitcoin improvement proposal aimed at restricting the writing of non-financial data on the blockchain for about a year. The proposal was led by Luke Dashjr, developer and co-founder and technical director of Ocean Mining Pool, who goes by the pseudonym Dathon Ohom. According to them, the project mainly targets Ordinals inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, the Runes protocol and, more broadly, arbitrary data that its supporters regard as "spam."

According to its introduction, BIP-110 will introduce seven new consensus rules designed to limit the space occupied by these inscriptions. It will significantly reduce the size of the new transaction output to 34 bytes, but the OP_RETURN output will be capped at 83 bytes while limiting data insertion to 256 bytes. The proposal also places multiple restrictions on certain Taproot features, including attachments, control blocks and some opcodes.

To ensure compatibility with funds already in the network, UTXOs created before the activation of BIP-110 will be permanently exempt from these new rules. Therefore, these restrictions only apply to new transactions created after the soft fork takes effect.

Soft forks that break traditional activation methods

Unlike previous major upgrades to Bitcoin, BIP-110 relies on user-activated soft forks (UASF), a mechanism that transfers activation rights from miners to node operators. A soft fork is a backward-compatible update that makes protocol rules stricter but does not prevent older versions of software from continuing to run.

In traditional deployment methods, miners signal by changing the information bits in the blocks they produce until the threshold required to activate updates is reached. But for BIP-110's approach, nodes can enforce its rules if miners disagree, with the miner's signal threshold set to 55% in a 2016 block period instead of the traditional 95%.

The miners 'vote was clear

Even under this significantly reduced threshold, they did not gain any support. According to BIP-110 monitoring data, miners 'approval rating has never exceeded approximately 1% in any period since the signal began in spring 2026, and is approximately 0.91% at the time of writing. Large mining pools like Foundry USA or AntPool have not joined the initiative, while F2Pool has publicly opposed it. Almost all of the blocks that send BIP-110 signals come from the Ocean Mining Pool (co-founded by Luke Dashjr) and a few small independent operators.

The situation is similar on the user side. The vast majority of Bitcoin core clients used by network nodes will not integrate BIP-110. Only operators who use the Bitcoin Knots client and voluntarily configure their software to apply these new rules are likely to participate in its activation.

Deadline approaches. The current signal cycle covers blocks 957,600 to 959,615, while the voluntary lock deadline is set at block 961,542 in the next cycle (expected in early August). Nodes running BIP-110 software may start rejecting any unsignaled blocks from then on, with activation scheduled for around September. In fact, rules enforced by a few nodes and few miners will not change anything for Bitcoin users, but will lead to the division of a few chains.

For ordinary users, as long as BIP-110 fails to achieve mass adoption, the consequences should remain limited. However, if the proposal gathers a significant portion of the network's computing power (e.g., a hash rate of more than 20%), it could lead to a decrease in temporary hash rates on the main chain, an increase in isolated blocks, and chaos in wallets and exchanges, which will subsequently spark debate over which chain can legitimately claim the name "Bitcoin."

Beyond the inscription: Bitcoin's fundamental philosophy faces test

In addition to its low technical support, the main obstacle to BIP-110 is what it questions: the founding principles of Bitcoin. Since its birth in 2009, the agreement has been built on a simple idea: to become a decentralized, neutral, censory-resistant network where no one can decide which transactions are legal. As long as a transaction complies with consensus rules and a fee is paid, Bitcoin does not distinguish between the nature of the data it carries.

This is why BIP-110 has aroused strong opposition. By trying to restrict certain inscriptions (such as Ordinals, BRC-20, or Runes), the proposal introduces a form of filtering on how blockchain is used. Such an evolution would violate the original spirit of Bitcoin-for more than 15 years, it has been operating without a central authority to choose acceptable transactions. Changing consensus rules to exclude certain uses would set a precedent that could open the door to other forms of censorship, which runs counter to the idea of making Bitcoin open without a license agreement.

This opposition was mainly raised by two of the most influential figures in the industry. Strategy founder Michael Saylor rejected BIP-110, claiming that "there are 110 things more dangerous than 'spam' for Bitcoin. He believes the proposal is not limited to combating abuse of inscriptions: it "transforms a debate about spam into a consensus change that would invalidate some valid and paid transactions. "The real danger for Saylor is the precedent this change could set.

This view is also shared by Adam Back, co-founder of Blockstream and inventor of the Hashcash system cited in the Bitcoin white paper. In response to BIP-110 supporters, he reminded them that "Bitcoin politely rejects what you want," arguing that the protocol should not be changed to meet the expectations of a certain user group. In his view, those who want to apply the new rules are free to create their own forks, but "Bitcoin will not join them," and he reiterated that the basic rules of the network cannot be imposed by a few.

Thus, BIP-110 embodies a new battle over the future of Bitcoin: on the one hand, those who want to restrict certain blockchain uses, and on the other, those who defend the neutrality of the protocol. Despite its technical goals, the proposal has difficulty gaining the necessary consensus among miners and users. Its activation is more likely to lead to a split in the Bitcoin chain than to lead to real improvements.