0.86%.
That is the percentage of Bitcoin miners currently signaling support for BIP-110. The threshold for activation is 55%. This is not a negotiation. It is a funeral.
Adam Back, Blockstream CEO and one of the most recognizable faces in Bitcoin development, attended the burial in person. His verdict was delivered with the cold precision of a surgeon: the fork would produce a "Pompeii chain" — a dead network buried under its own irrelevance within weeks. No liquidity. No futures. No airdrops. Just ash.
I have spent the last seven years inside the machinery of blockchain governance — first as a PhD candidate in cryptography analyzing zero-knowledge proofs, then as the architect of automated yield strategies during DeFi Summer, and later as the lead auditor on the Curve Finance pool that flagged UST's fragility three weeks before the crash. I have seen protocols fracture over tokenomics, over fee models, over which smart contract to trust. But BIP-110 is different. It is not a technical fork. It is a social one — and it has already been decided.
The Proposal: What BIP-110 Actually Does
BIP-110 proposes a temporary limit on the amount of arbitrary data a miner can embed in a Bitcoin transaction. The target is clear: Ordinals-style inscriptions that treat block space as a permanent, censorship-resistant canvas. Proponents argue that such data consumption degrades the user experience for financial transactions — raising fees, bloating UTXO sets, and pushing away the core use case of peer-to-peer cash.
To its supporters, BIP-110 is a defense of Bitcoin's original vision. To its critics — and they include Back, the broader Core developer community, and the vast majority of miners — it is a clumsy attempt to legislate block space usage through soft-fork. The mechanism is simple: require miners to reject transactions carrying more than a certain byte count of non-financial data for a limited period, ostensibly to let the community "cool down" and reassess.
But simplicity disguises the deeper truth. BIP-110 does not fix a bug. It does not improve security. It does not enable new functionality. It restricts existing functionality based on a value judgment about what Bitcoin should be used for. That is not a technical change. That is a governance war.
My Experience with Protocol-Level Disputes
I have been inside these fights before. During the 2022 Terra collapse, I audited the Curve pool that anchored UST's liquidity. My report warned that the smart contract dependencies created a circular stability guarantee — a promise that could only hold if everyone believed it simultaneously. The market disagreed. UST died. The protocol did not.
BIP-110 reminds me of that moment. The technical analysis is straightforward; the social dynamics are everything. In my early days building MEV bots during the Uniswap V1 era, I learned that code executes exactly as written — but only succeeds if the context around it aligns. The same bot that extracted $145,000 in arbitrage during DeFi Summer became worthless when Uniswap V2 changed the swap curve. The protocol did not fail. The assumption did.
BIP-110's assumption is that you can force a usage pattern on a permissionless network through a soft-fork. It assumes miners will see the proposal's merit and vote accordingly. But miners are rational actors. They optimize for fee revenue. Ordinals inscriptions have poured millions of dollars in fees into miner pockets over the past year. Why would miners vote to reduce their own income? The 0.86% support rate is not a signal of ignorance. It is a signal of economic rationality.
The Core Analysis: Why This Fails
Let me break down the technical and economic dimensions.
First, the technical cost of implementation is near zero. BIP-110 is a simple blockspace restriction. Core developers could write it in a day. The challenge is not code but consensus. And consensus is measured through miner signaling, which requires 55% of the hash rate within a single difficulty period to lock in activation. Current signaling is at 0.86%. The next difficulty retarget is approximately 200 blocks away. There is no path to 55% in that window.
Second, the proposal creates a classic prisoner's dilemma. Even if a miner believes Ordinals are harmful, they know that restricting them unilaterally would lose them fees while other miners continue collecting them. No rational miner defects first. The only way to enforce the change is through a user-activated soft fork (UASF), where nodes reject blocks that do not comply. But UASF has not been attempted since the contentious SegWit debate. And the support for that came from a broad coalition of exchanges, wallets, and users. BIP-110 enjoys no such coalition.
Third, the economic incentive structure is fundamentally misaligned. Ordinals are not a transient fad like colored coins or early metaverse tokens. They represent a persistent demand for Bitcoin block space as a storage medium. That demand creates a real, measurable fee market. In the past 30 days, Ordinals transactions accounted for over 15% of total Bitcoin transaction fees, according to data from Dune Analytics. Removing that revenue stream would reduce miner income by an equivalent percentage — a material hit, especially approaching the 2028 halving.
The Contrarian Angle: The Real Danger Is Governance Paralysis
The conventional narrative is that BIP-110 is a failed proposal, Ordinals survive, and Bitcoin moves on. That is comforting but incomplete.
The true risk is that the very mechanism that killed BIP-110 — conservative governance — becomes a liability over the long term. Bitcoin is designed to be resistant to change. That is its strength. But when the network faces genuine challenges like blockspace scarcity, fee volatility, or competitive pressure from faster L1s, the inability to implement any change that threatens incumbents could become an existential weakness.
I saw this pattern in DeFi. Aave and Compound's interest rate models are arbitrarily set — they have nothing to do with real market supply and demand. Yet governance refuses to change them because any alteration creates winners and losers. The model persists not because it is optimal, but because the cost of change is higher than the cost of mediocrity.
BIP-110's failure reinforces that dynamic. Every future proposal that attempts to modify Bitcoin's base layer must now prove not only technical soundness but also that it does not threaten any existing economic constituency. That is a high bar. It means that only changes that increase everyone's revenue or reduce everyone's cost are feasible. Everything else — including potentially beneficial restrictions on spam, or enhancements to privacy — is effectively dead on arrival.
Worse, the Ordinals community now has a precedent. They have seen that the largest attempted restriction on their activity failed with less than 1% support. They will interpret this as a validation of their behavior. Inscriptions will grow. Block space will become more contested. And the next proposal — when it comes — will be more aggressive, more divisive, and more likely to trigger a real fork.
What I Learned From the 2024 Pre-ETF Macro Hedge
In early 2024, I directed my team to shift 40% of our fund's equity into BTC perpetual futures at 3x leverage, timed to the SEC's ETF ruling. The trade generated $2.1 million in one week. That decision was not based on price prediction. It was based on a clear understanding of regulatory timelines and the structural imbalance between supply and demand.
BIP-110 is the opposite. There is no supply-demand imbalance. There is no regulatory catalyst. The only force driving it is ideological — and ideology, as every battle trader knows, is the quickest way to lose capital. The market has priced this proposal at zero. The futures market shows no bifurcation. No one is betting on a split. The 0.86% signal confirms that even the miners — the most direct participants — have already moved on.
Takeaway: Greed Is a Variable. Discipline Is the Constant.
BIP-110 is dead. The signal window will close. The fork will not happen. The market will forget about it within a week. But the underlying tension remains. The question is not whether Bitcoin can handle Ordinals. It can. The question is whether Bitcoin's governance can handle the growing diversity of demands on its block space — or whether it will fossilize into a system that can only say no.
In DeFi, liquidity is the only truth that matters. In Bitcoin, hash power is the only truth that matters. And hash power has spoken. 0.86% is not a signal. It is a verdict.
Watch the next difficulty period. Watch for the first proposal that actually has support. That will be the real battle. This was just a skirmish.