Bitcoin BIP-110 Soft Fork Dies on Tiny Miner Support

Bitcoin’s BIP-110 soft fork can never reach its 55% miner signaling threshold and will spin off a minority chain, Farside Insights declared on August 1. Support stayed under 3% throughout the window.

The temporary data limits, pitched as an anti-spam fix for Ordinals and inscriptions, met wall after wall from miners, developers and corporate holders. Michael Saylor led the public case against it.

What the Soft Fork Tried to Stop

BIP-110, formally the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, was authored by Dathon Ohm and assigned in December 2025. It sought a roughly one-year set of tighter consensus rules to curb non-monetary data on the chain.

Supporters wanted to push Bitcoin back toward pure payments after inscriptions, BRC-20s and Runes filled blocks and raised fees in 2023-2024. The plan grandfathered older UTXOs so existing coins stayed spendable.

The seven temporary consensus rules in BIP-110 targeted the most common spam vectors while leaving core monetary paths open:

• New output scriptPubKeys over 34 bytes invalid (OP_RETURN up to 83 bytes allowed)
• OP_PUSHDATA and script argument witness items over 256 bytes invalid (redeemScript exception)
• Spending undefined witness or Tapleaf versions invalid
• Witness stacks with Taproot annex invalid
• Taproot control blocks larger than 257 bytes invalid
• Tapscripts containing OP_SUCCESS* opcodes invalid
• Tapscripts executing OP_IF or OP_NOTIF invalid

After the year the rules would expire. Proponents said the pause would free resources and signal that data storage is unsupported.

The Signaling Math Never Added Up

BIP-110 used a 55% miner signaling threshold in each 2,016-block difficulty period for early lock-in. That sat far below the traditional 95% BIP-9 bar for permanent changes. A mandatory signaling window around block 961,632 (early August 2026) was the backup path via user-activated soft fork.

Actual support stayed tiny. Cumulative signaling hovered near 0.4% for long stretches and peaked around 2.54% in recent blocks, according to trackers Saylor and others cited. Major pools controlling over 70% of hashrate (Foundry, AntPool, ViaBTC, F2Pool) never signaled. Ocean’s late default switch barely moved the needle.

Farside Insights posted the final call: “BIP-110 has now failed to reach a 55% threshold and can never reach such a threshold! BIP-110 failed and it will now spin off (Assuming no re-orgs).”

Saylor and Allies Drew the Line

Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy (the largest public corporate Bitcoin holder), published a 110-point critique. He called the proposal an “iatrogenic” fix worse than the spam it targeted.

BIP-110 turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions. That precedent is the danger. We should save our energy for threats that really matter.

Saylor wrote that later. He argued Bitcoin cannot read intent, so consensus should not judge content. Fee markets and individual relay policies already handle spam without rewriting validity rules. Lowering the bar to 55% risked splits and chilled future innovation. On August 1 he noted less than 1 percent of economic weight had adopted it, rejecting node-count claims of broader support.

Adam Back of Blockstream said Bitcoin “respectfully says no” and would not join any minority fork. JAN3 CEO Samson Mow mocked the economics of a 1% attack and published satire of a post-fork chain with only 83 users. Critics also flagged technical risks: possible activation bugs, frozen pre-signed paths, and incomplete spam coverage (Runes largely untouched; steganography still possible).

Saylor’s firm holds hundreds of thousands of BTC. His stand fits a pattern of active treasury voice seen in Strategy’s large Bitcoin treasury moves and Saylor’s recent Bitcoin accumulation signals.

Rules That Stayed on Paper

The seven temporary consensus rules in BIP-110 were deliberately simple to speed review. Motivation language stressed distorted incentives from standardized arbitrary data, node costs, and the need to “do one thing well.”

Grandfathering protected pre-activation UTXOs. Post-activation new outputs faced the caps. Temporary design left room for a better long-term fix later. Yet Farside’s own Q&A noted real downsides: certain miniscript wallets could generate unspendable outputs; P2PK creation banned; pre-signed multi-path transactions spanning the window at risk; no full spam ban.

Developers had already shown images could still land via other encodings. The temporary nature itself was unprecedented and risked repeating the fight in twelve months.

What the Minority Chain Means

Nodes running Bitcoin Knots (the main enforcing client) will reject non-signaling blocks once the mandatory window opens. With almost no miners signaling, those nodes sit on a low-hashrate spin-off. Difficulty will adjust downward over time.

BIP-110 carried no replay protection because it was written for consensus success, not a split. Transactions valid on one chain can replay on the other.

What We Know

• Main-chain exchanges and ETF custodians stay on the majority rules; most ETF prospectuses abandon forked assets
• Self-custody Knots users will follow the minority chain unless they switch clients
• Hashrate and economic weight remain overwhelmingly on the unenforced chain

What’s Unconfirmed

• Exact duration and liquidity of any spin-off market
• Whether residual Knots enforcement creates lasting confusion for casual users
• Long-term fee impact if spam simply migrates to new encodings

For most holders the practical risk is low. Large transfers during the window may still warrant extra confirmations until the dust settles. The activation paths and fund freeze risks are detailed in Farside’s technical note.

Governance Holds the Line Again

Bitcoin has no single decision body. Changes need rough consensus across developers, miners, nodes and the economy that prices the chain. BIP-110 won vocal support among some node operators angry at Core’s OP_RETURN relay relaxation and at inscription bloat. It never won the other three constituencies.

The 2017 SegWit UASF succeeded because exchanges, wallets and businesses aligned first; miners followed. BIP-110 never built that economic majority. Inscriptions had paid real fees. Miners had little reason to risk a split over basis-point revenue.

Corporate treasuries now sit inside the economic layer. Saylor’s intervention made that explicit. Future contested changes will face the same multi-party filter. Spam pressure remains a fee-market and policy question, not a low-threshold consensus rewrite.

Ordinals activity once claimed double-digit shares of fees and blockspace in peak waves. Those waves already faded under higher monetary demand. The failed fork leaves that dynamic intact.

BIP-110 is dead as a main-chain rule set. A thin Knots minority chain may persist for a while. The broader network keeps the open validity rules it already had.