Finding the right path in the maze of cryptography and decentralized consensus has never been a walk in the park. This weekend, the Bitcoin network, a fortress renowned for being impregnable and immutable, is inexorably approaching a block that no one, or almost no one, wanted to see arrive under such conditions of uncertainty and discord. As these lines are written, the network has validated block 961,545. At block 961,632, expected this Saturday during the day according to algorithmic projections from various community monitors, a major technical event threatens to shake the sacrosanct unity of the ledger.
Dissident nodes running Bitcoin Knots and applying the BIP-110 improvement proposal will begin to reject any block that does not explicitly signal its support for this restrictive measure. On paper, the rule set is disarmingly simple : filter the data to purify the network. In reality, this directive opens the door to a cataclysmic scenario that Bitcoin has not seen since the legendary and traumatic “Block Size Wars” that culminated in 2017. This scenario is one of division : two chains coexisting antagonistically, each with its impassioned supporters, stubborn miners, and its own vision of what the future of digital currency should be.
To understand the magnitude of the threat, one cannot simply skim the headlines of the specialized press. It is imperative to dissect the protocol’s recent history, the ideological motivations of the actors involved, the relentless mechanics of forks, and the anxiety-inducing security context exacerbated by parallel hardware failures, such as the recent Coldcard wallet vulnerability. This article aims to demystify the technical psychodrama of BIP-110 and reveal the true governance stakes of a network worth over a trillion dollars.
To grasp the essence of the resentment that gave birth to BIP-110, we must trace back to the source of the discord : the very nature of the data stored on the Bitcoin blockchain. Historically, Bitcoin was designed by Satoshi Nakamoto as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Its architecture was optimized to process financial transactions with maximum security. However, the major upgrades of SegWit (2017) and Taproot (2021), while designed to improve transaction efficiency and privacy, inadvertently opened an architectural Pandora’s box.
Clever developers discovered that it was possible to exploit the space reserved for witness data (which is supposed to contain cryptographic signatures) to inscribe arbitrary data. Thus, Ordinals were born, a protocol allowing images, text, code, or even video games to be attached to individual satoshis (the smallest unit of Bitcoin). Overnight, the Bitcoin network became a decentralized hosting platform for NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) and memecoins (via the BRC-20 standard).
While a portion of the community celebrated this unexpected innovation that caused network activity and miner revenues to skyrocket (with transaction fees soaring), a faction of “purists” and legacy developers perceived this trend as a direct attack on the protocol. To them, these inscriptions are nothing but “parasitic uses,” spam that artificially bloats the blockchain’s size, hogs node bandwidth, and prices out legitimate financial transactions, especially those in developing nations where high fees make Bitcoin unusable daily.
This resentment quickly mutated into a will to act. How could the network be cleaned up without breaking its consensus model ? From this existential question, BIP-110 was born—a radical attempt to purge the blockchain of this deemed undesirable data.
BIP-110 (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110), officially dubbed the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, is a surgical response to the Ordinals epidemic. Authored by a developer operating under the pseudonym Dathon Ohm, this text does not seek to categorically ban a technology—which would be technically unfeasible—but targets the profitability and feasibility of massive inscriptions.
To conclude, the proposal temporarily caps (for an expected duration of about a year) the absolute amount of arbitrary data that a specific transaction can carry in its witness or OP_RETURN fields. By imposing strict limits on the size of this non-financial data, BIP-110 aims to make the creation of large NFTs on Bitcoin economically prohibitive or technically impossible. The stated goal is to reprioritize standard monetary transactions and the proper functioning of the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s second-layer scaling solution.
