On July 3rd, I refreshed bip110.org for the third time that morning. The tally remained unchanged: zero blocks signaling support for BIP-110. Yet the forced activation window—hardcoded into the client by its authors—is set to open in early August. It's a ticking time bomb in the heart of Bitcoin's consensus layer, one that almost no miner has agreed to defuse.
We didn't start this war. We just wanted to inscribe a meme. But the battle lines have been drawn: on one side, a small but vocal group of core developers who believe Bitcoin must remain pure digital cash; on the other, a growing ecosystem that sees Bitcoin as a permissionless data layer for everything from digital art to financial tokens. And at the center of it all, a proposal called BIP-110 that could force the network to choose.
### Context: The Purist Uprising BIP-110, authored by Dathon Ohm with contributions from veteran developer Luke Dashjr, is deceptively simple: limit the amount of non-transaction data that can be carried in a Bitcoin transaction to 256 bytes. In practice, this would kill Ordinals inscriptions, which currently embed entire files—often hundreds of kilobytes—inside Bitcoin's UTXO set. The rationale is ideological: Bitcoin was designed for peer-to-peer value transfer, not for storing JPEGs or issuing tokens. To its proponents, Ordinals are spam that bloat the blockchain and increase costs for full node operators.
But the proposal's activation mechanism is what makes it explosive. Instead of requiring majority miner signaling—the traditional path for protocol changes—BIP-110 uses a forced activation window. Once that window opens, any node running the updated software will reject blocks that contain transactions exceeding the 256-byte limit, regardless of whether the majority of miners agree. This is a radical departure from Bitcoin's rough consensus model, and it has triggered a crisis of legitimacy.
Miner response has been decisive: less than 1% of blocks signal support. Yet the window remains set. Luke Dashjr has stated publicly, "If BIP-110 fails, Bitcoin fails." The Ordinals community, led by creator Casey Rodarmor, is not waiting to see what happens. They've already proposed a workaround.
### Core: The Workaround Paradox Here's where the technical analysis gets interesting. The Ordinals workaround is elegant in its simplicity: instead of inscribing a large file in a single transaction, split it into 256-byte chunks, each one compliant with the proposed limit. Then reassemble them off-chain. This preserves the spirit of Ordinals while technically satisfying BIP-110's rule.
But in doing so, the workaround may achieve the exact opposite of what BIP-110's supporters claim to want. Let's examine the economics. A typical Ordinal inscription today is around 100 kilobytes. Under the workaround, that becomes roughly 400 separate transactions. Each transaction must pay a miner fee to be confirmed. In a congested block, those fees could skyrocket. Rather than reducing "spam" on the network, the workaround would multiply the number of spam-like transactions by two orders of magnitude. The UTXO set, already a concern for node operators, would grow even faster.
Based on my experience auditing incentive structures during the 2022 bear market, I've seen how well-intentioned protocol changes often produce perverse outcomes. In this case, BIP-110 could create a world where the exact activity it aims to ban becomes even more resource-intensive. The miners, who currently benefit from the fee revenue generated by Ordinals and Runes, might actually prefer the workaround—it gives them more transactions to include and more fees to collect. In October 2024, Runes alone drove a 32% increase in Bitcoin transaction fees, much of which went directly to miners. Why would they vote to cut off that revenue stream?
We didn't anticipate that the purist attack on data storage would spawn a more persistent, more fragmented form of the same activity. This is the hallmark of decentralized protocol governance: rules that are too rigid often generate creative circumvention that worsens the original problem.
But the deeper issue isn't technical—it's philosophical. Bitcoin's value proposition has always been its immutability and censorship resistance. By attempting to ban a specific use case, BIP-110 violates the principle that any validly signed transaction spending an unspent output should be allowed. This is the same principle that made Bitcoin useful for everything from remittances to illicit trade. To now say, "Except for data you can fit in 256 bytes" is an arbitrary gatekeeping that undermines the network's permissionless nature.
### Contrarian: The Forced Fork That Might Not Come Here's the counter-intuitive take: maybe the forced activation is exactly what needs to happen. If a small group of developers can implement a rule change that no miner supports, then the network will demonstrate that true decentralization means any faction can fork. The market will then decide which chain is the "real" Bitcoin. This would be a healthy stress test of the system.
Alternatively, the workaround could be so efficient that it makes the BIP-110 rule irrelevant. If every transaction is already within the 256-byte limit, the rule becomes cosmetic. The data layer moves from the transaction payload to the transaction metadata—essentially, the same functionality with a different encoding. The purists would have won nothing except a temporary inconvenience.
Perhaps the most dangerous outcome is a successful forced activation that creates a permanent split. In that scenario, we would have two Bitcoins: the "core chain" (without BIP-110, supported by the vast majority of miners) and the "covenants chain" (running BIP-110, supported by a few nodes). The covenants chain would likely have very little hash power and could become susceptible to attacks. But it would be the version that Luke Dashjr and his supporters consider legitimate. The rest of the world would likely ignore it.
We didn't realize that the biggest threat to Bitcoin's consensus wasn't a 51% attack, but a 0.1% ideological fork. The market has priced this conflict at near zero—Bitcoin's price barely reacted to the news. But history teaches us that such ignored risks can trigger sudden volatility when the window opens.
### Takeaway: The Fork in the Road As August approaches, we will see whether Bitcoin chooses to narrow its utility or embrace its chaotic evolution. The outcome won't be decided by votes or tweets, but by whether the workaround gains traction, whether miners signal support, and whether exchanges recognize more than one version of Bitcoin. One thing is certain: the Bitcoin we trade today will not be the Bitcoin of tomorrow. The only certainty is change.
We didn't think we'd be here, watching the blocks, waiting for a fork that could redefine the entire crypto landscape. But that's the beauty—and the terror—of decentralized consensus.