Key Takeaways:
Bitcoin's most prominent corporate and technical leaders have united against a proposal to restrict non-monetary transactions, exposing a deepening rift over who controls the network's rules.
BIP-110, a proposal to restrict non-monetary transactions on Bitcoin, drew opposition from Michael Saylor and Adam Back on July 11-12 over concerns it could invalidate ordinary fee-paying transactions.
"There are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam," Saylor, executive chairman at Strategy, said in a post to X on Saturday, adding that BIP-110 turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid transactions.
BIP-110 was introduced in December 2025 by pseudonymous developer Dathon Ohm with support from Ocean protocol founder Luke Dashjr. The proposal targets Ordinals inscriptions — images and text embedded on Bitcoin — which proponents call spam. Yet Ordinals activity has collapsed from a peak of more than 400,000 daily inscriptions in August 2023 to fewer than 10,000 over the past month, Dune Analytics data shows. In the latest voting period (period 475, blocks 955,584 to 957,599), only 1 percent of blocks signaled support for BIP-110, far below the 55 percent threshold required for activation.
The dispute echoes the Blocksize Wars of 2015-2017, when the community debated whether to risk a chain split to raise Bitcoin's block size limit. Back described BIP-110 as a "quest to police other people," arguing that Bitcoin's decentralized design means no single group can impose its preferences on the wider network. "Your permissionless recourse is to club together and create a fork," Back wrote. "But bitcoin won't be joining it." The activation window opens in early August, though support has never topped 0.79 percent since December 2025.
A 12-Year-Old Dispute Resurfaces
Nakamoto CEO David Bailey has resurfaced a 2014 controversy involving Dashjr, arguing the record disqualifies him from steering Bitcoin through the BIP-110 fight. Bailey wrote that Dashjr secretly added Bitcoin address blacklists to the Gentoo Linux package he maintained in 2014, blocking payments to gambling services such as SatoshiDice. The patch shipped by default; node operators noticed only when transactions failed. Dashjr later reversed the default, made it optional, and apologized. Bitcoin Core never shipped the blacklists. Supporters stress the context, but Bailey argued that "anyone with eyes can see its a non-starter" for one developer to steer a trillion-dollar asset.
What's at Stake
Bitcoin's market value sits near $1.3 trillion. Critics say that valuation should not hinge on one developer's preferences, though Dashjr is not Bitcoin Core's sole maintainer — a role shared among several contributors. His direct influence runs through Bitcoin Knots, an alternative client that powered about a fifth of the network's public nodes during the 2025 spam fight. Dashjr has called the fight existential, warning Bitcoin fails if the proposal fails. Bailey also questioned which chain cash-settled Bitcoin futures on the CME exchange would track in a split scenario. "Whether TradFi like it or not, they're locked in the insane asylum with all of us," he added. The question of who gets to shape Bitcoin's rules remains unresolved as the early August activation deadline approaches.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
