Bitcoin: The Anti-Spam Fork BIP-110 Has Failed
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A proposal set out to ban images, text and other “spam” data from the Bitcoin blockchain. The showdown came over the weekend – and the result was clear: the breakaway chain managed just two blocks in 15 hours, while Bitcoin moved on by 90.
Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110, or BIP-110, has divided the Bitcoin community for months. The decision came on Saturday evening – and BIP-110 lost. The rule change would have needed 55 percent support from miners. It got 2.53 percent.
What it was about
Only around four megabytes fit into each Bitcoin block. Anyone who pays can fill that space – including with things that have nothing to do with payments: images, text, so-called inscriptions or Ordinals. Part of the community sees this as spam that bloats the blockchain and drives up fees for ordinary transfers.
BIP-110 wanted to restrict such data at the consensus level for roughly one year. The proposal is credited to the pseudonym “Dathon Ohm”; the driving force behind it is widely seen as long-time developer Luke Dashjr, who also maintains the alternative Bitcoin software Knots.
Why many rejected the method
Plenty of people shared the goal. The criticism was aimed at how it was pursued – on three counts:
The low threshold. 55 percent support is very little for a change to Bitcoin’s core rules. Earlier upgrades such as SegWit or Taproot had almost the entire network behind them.
The built-in chain split. Normally a proposal simply fails if support is missing. BIP-110 was designed differently: as a “User Activated Soft Fork” (UASF), it was set to split off onto its own chain if the threshold was missed. That is exactly what happened.
The limited effect. Even if it had succeeded, BIP-110 would not really have stopped spam. The rule was capped at one year, and anyone determined to store data in the blockchain tends to find new ways within whatever limits remain.
On top of that came a more fundamental objection: whoever pays for block space should decide what to use it for. Otherwise the protocol starts deciding which transactions are “desirable” – for many, an opening for censorship.
The night of the decision
Block 961,631 was found at around 7:30 p.m. UTC. From that moment on, mandatory signaling was live: nodes running BIP-110 rules would only accept blocks that explicitly signaled support, and rejected everything else.
Block 961,632 arrived first on the regular Bitcoin blockchain – and was discarded by the BIP-110 nodes. Shortly afterwards, a separate block 961,632 appeared on the BIP-110 chain, followed by 961,633. For a moment it was genuinely open: had the new chain grown faster, it would have had to be taken seriously.
Then nothing happened. Around 15 hours later, Bitcoin stood at block 961,722 while the BIP-110 chain was still at 961,633 – a gap of 90 blocks.
Why the chain is effectively dead
The reason is simple: a breakaway chain inherits Bitcoin’s full mining difficulty but has only a fraction of the computing power. Michael Saylor put that share at roughly 0.15 percent. Instead of one block every ten minutes, the fork produces one every few hours.
That difficulty only adjusts downward after 2,016 blocks. At this pace, that would take years – monitoring services estimate around 350 days, if it even continued at all. And miners have no incentive: they would spend the same expensive resources for coins that no exchange trades.
Both blocks were mined by a miner calling itself “Roughnecks” via the OCEAN pool. That drew laughter in the community, since Luke Dashjr co-founded OCEAN. Roughnecks has since disbanded – much suggests the hashrate was simply rented.
There is also a risk for users: both chains accept the same transactions, and replay protection is missing. A transaction signed on the fork chain can therefore also be executed on the real Bitcoin network.
High-profile opposition
Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy, published a list of 110 arguments against the proposal in July. He said he shared the goals but considered the approach an attack on the neutrality of the rules: consensus rules should respond to demonstrated threats, not to intentions attributed to users. Bitcoin does not need guardians of purity, he argued, but neutral guardians.
Blockstream CEO Adam Back warned of damage to Bitcoin’s credibility and cautioned that certain holdings (UTXOs) could become unspendable under the new rules. Analyst PlanB voiced concerns as well. The dispute even reached developer governance: Bitcoin Core developer Murch proposed removing Dashjr as a BIP editor.
Supporters are not giving up
Dashjr himself is sticking with it. He argues that miners ignoring BIP-110 are producing invalid blocks and losing money – and that they are attacking Bitcoin. (From the majority chain’s perspective those blocks are perfectly valid; they are invalid only under BIP-110’s rules.) The slow block times on his own chain, he says, are acceptable. Among supporters, a change of mining algorithm is also being discussed. That would turn the split into a separate cryptocurrency for good.
Markets shrugged. Coinbase and Kraken reported normal operations.
What remains is the lesson BIP-110 delivered involuntarily: Bitcoin is practically impossible to change against the will of the majority. The debate over spam – and over what miners will live on as block rewards keep shrinking – is far from over.
