BIP-110 Is Coming: Can Bitcoin Users Take Back the Network?

The controversial BIP-110, a soft fork with which normal Bitcoin users will take the power back from suitcoiners and scammers, is upon us. Learn all about it below… but first… The BIP-110 Train Remains On Schedule I failed the BIP-110 supporters and the larger Bitcoin community by not releasing this article sooner. In my defense, I will only say that I still think Bitcoin is the greatest idea humanity has ever had, but I lost faith in the humans stewarding the project. It appears every Core developer and most so-called Bitcoin influencers are compromised in some kind of way, which is heartbreaking. It also seems like the suitcoiners and the governments made their move and took over, facing no resistance.The BIP-110 people, the ones who believe Bitcoin is money and nothing else, are the only obstacle remaining in their way. And, as the time of activation approaches, they’ve unleashed all kinds of dirty tactics to try and stop the soft fork. Sadly for them, the BIP-110 train remains on schedule. And as long as there’s hope, we must fight. So, here we go. Bitcoin, The Network Vs. bitcoin, The Asset First of all, to avoid confusion, let’s clarify these concepts: Bitcoin, the network = rules without rulers. Those rules include filters. bitcoin, the asset = unstoppable, censorship-resistant money. Emphasis on MONEY. The pro-SPAM propagandist and their army of useful idiots used to claim that enforcing filters meant imposing some kind of “censorship” on the network. The fact of the matter is, filters have always been there because a network needs rules. Bitcoin’s promise has always been censorship-resistant MONEY, and monetary transactions are not at risk under BIP-110. Monetary transactions, the sole purpose of the Bitcoin network, are exactly what the anti-SPAM movement is trying to protect. Think about it: is there another monetary network in which normal transactions have to compete with spam for validation? There isn’t, because it doesn’t make sense. The network should wise up and update the filters to mitigate inscriptions and the insertion of arbitrary data of any kind, so monetary transactions can flourish, but that’s a story for another day. Mea Culpa: I Made Some Mistakes In The Previous Article First of all, BIP-110 is not about Spam per se. It’s about the OP_RETURN limit that had been there for a decade. Bitcoin Core increased the default over 1200% despite great opposition even within their own ranks; BIP-110 brings it back to its previous state. I’m learning as I go, and inmy introductory BIP-110 article, I wrote: **“Ultimately, the miners will decide, but their job is to do what the nodes signal. The miners are there to make money, sure, but to earn it, they have to service the network. Will they read the tea leaves and understand that decisively attacking SPAM will positively impact the price? They should, because the move signals that Bitcoin is money. That’s what the market wants to hear. That’s what every honest bitcoiner is here for. ” \ I was, naively, thinking that the miners would do what’s right because it benefited them. And they should, but that’s not how the world works. However, the BIP-110 technical people are willing to fire them. They are willing to switch PoW algorithms and render all their ASICs useless. A scary proposition, if you ask me.However, I understand the play. Given how centralized Bitcoin mining is, miners could collude and steer the network to whatever port they want. If that were the end of the game, Bitcoin would be pointless, because miners would have all the power.Still, I hope the situation doesn’t come to a PoW algorithm change. That would mean a hard fork, which is something only the most nihilist Bitcoiners want. As you will see, the game theory points to a smooth BIP-110 activation, but that’s only on theory. We will have to wait and see. In the meantime, let’s analyze the literature around BIP-110. Exhibit A: Lopp Can’t Find ONE Good Argument Against BIP-110 Let’s start with a bang. It’s hard to take “A Layman’s Guide To BIP-110” seriously, because Mr. Loops tries to sell obvious lies like “I don't have any financial incentive to be against BIP-110.” Everybody knows he’s invested in Citrea, but he tries to convince us that their service doesn’t need large OP_RETURNs. The thing is, Lopp himself said that the only “extreme edge cases” that need giant OP_RETURNs are Citrea-related. How can we trust him after that? We can’t, because everything he says is easy to refute even for a non-technical bitcoiner like me. For example, Lopp claims: “Bitcoin's strength lies in its censorship resistance and predictability. BIP-110 signals that the protocol can be altered to censor subjectively "undesirable" transactions, eroding its image as permissionless programmable money.” Here, Mr. Lopp is intentionally mixing bitcoin, the asset, with Bitcoin, the network. He knows the difference, but he’s trying to trick his audience.He also adds “programmable money” to the mix, because that’s what Citrea offers. What the world needs, though, is sound money. For Bitcoin to be sound money, the rules have to be clear, that’s true. Those rules have traditionally involved strong anti-SPAM filters, and Bitcoin Core has been doing everything in its power to erode them. The organization was willing to lose its status as Bitcoin’s reference implementation to remove them, which is suspicious, to say the least. Let’s look at another example of disingenuous framing by Mr. Lopp: “If successful, it encourages more reactionary forks to "kick out bad actors" which goes against the ethos of Bitcoin being a neutral network in which enemies can operate without fear of being censored.” Once again, Bitcoin is neutral money, not a neutral network. The network needs rules to operate. The classic phrase is “Bitcoin is MONEY for enemies,” but Mr. Lopp modified it to suit Citrea’s needs and, once again, to fool his readers.Another example: “There's not a rational reason for miners to WANT to support BIP-110 because it only results in to REDUCING the transaction fees they collect. Why would anyone in their right mind voluntarily take a pay cut?” Well, Bitcoin is only valuable if it’s money. All SPAM transactions are antithetical to Bitcoin as money. So, the purchasing power of those transaction fees is intrinsically linked to BIP-110 succeeding. These transaction fees are peanuts compared to what miners will lose if the network doesn’t tackle the SPAM problem head-on. Exhibit B: The Numbers Behind The Soft Fork We can learn a lot about BIP-110 by reading Renaud Cuny’s Substack. For example, according to Blockspace Weekly, “before February 2023: non-financial data in Bitcoin blocks was near zero.” Roughly on that date, Casey Rodarmor released Ordinals, his attack on Bitcoin, and these are the consequences: 149 million non-financial transactions in three and a half years 82GB of arbitrary data added to every full node, permanently 40% of blockspace consumed by spam in the last 90 days of 2025 less than 1% of total miner revenue in last 3 years contributed by that spam Brutal numbers. The network is clearly under attack.In the same article, the author addresses one of the few valid criticisms of BIP-110: “This is where BIP-110 critics sometimes have a point worth engaging seriously. A 55% UASF with mandatory signaling is a lower threshold than Bitcoin’s standard 95% BIP9 process. That’s a legitimate design debate. But it’s worth being precise: soft forks by definition do not require existing users to do anything. Non-upgraded nodes remain functional. The only parties who need to act are those choosing to use the restricted functionality.” However, Mr. Cuny points out, “BIP-110 doesn’t introduce new functionality but enforces a constraint. It removes attack surface.” Also, as Mr. Carvalho will state ahead, “a 55% threshold is aggressive by Bitcoin standards, but defensible for a temporary measure.” The fact of the matter is, BIP-110 restores Bitcoin to what it was before Bitcoin Core blew the default OP_RETURN limits in what used to be Bitcoin’s reference implementation.On that note, reflect on this: After clear rejection by a part of the community, an outright civil war, a soft fork that they deem as dangerous, and most importantly for them, a 50% drawdown on price, Bitcoin Core is not willing to restore the OP_RETURN limits. Conclusion: that change has to be extremely important to their handlers, the people who co-opted Bitcoin Core.(Learn more about Bitcoin Core’s CAPTURE by reading this series:The Network, The Lever, The Merge) Exhibit C: Another Valid Criticism Of BIP-110… Kind Of One of the few voices in Bitcoin I still respect, independent developer Supertestnet, is against BIP-110. So much so that he created a User Rejected Soft Fork, the response against BIP-110 that detractors should’ve supported if they were serious opposition. They didn’t. No one is running Supertestnet’s URSF.However, in its documentation, we find the second valid criticism of BIP-110: “In certain circumstances, it freezes the funds of wallets that use the miniscript language in a certain way. Miniscript is a bitcoin smart contracting language with a bunch of built in functions, and it is designed to "compile" a bitcoin wallet that uses one or more of those functions as selected by users and/or developers. Some of those functions sometimes violate one of BIP110's proposed rules (the rule against using the OP_IF function in taproot wallets), which could cause users of some miniscript wallets to have their funds frozen, depending on how they use it.” As you can see, this refers to a very specific function used in a very specific way. Read between the lines, Supertestnet says “in certain circumstances,” “in a certain way,” “Some of those functions sometimes,” etc. He’s referring to an extreme edge case, and advanced miniscript users had months to change their coins to a safe location, just in case. And even if those few advanced Bitcoin users experimenting with miniscript didn’t do that, BIP-110 is a temporary soft fork. They would only have to wait a year to get control of their coins back.A worthy sacrifice for getting Bitcoin back to its original purpose, if you ask me. Exhibit D: The Legal Case Against Bitcoin In the introductory BIP-110 article, we discussed what is arguably the main fear that the soft fork responds to: the possibility of ungodly images and videos getting into the Bitcoin blockchain. “With v30, Bitcoin Core opened the floodgates for this kind of material. Since the change, the network as a whole is responsible. Technically, every miner in the ecosystem could get those tainted transactions into a block, and every node could be found guilty of hosting such files.” In another Blockspace Weekly article, Mr Cuny argues that none of the ways arbitrary data abuses the Bitcoin network alone “breaks” Bitcoin. “The response threshold is never cleanly crossed. That’s not coincidence, that’s the strategy working.” The attack was coordinated, well-funded, and well-thought-out. If Bitcoin’s immune system doesn’t act, the legal ramifications for the network could be devastating.Before Core v30, the Bitcoin network was protected, as Blockspace Weekly puts it: “The legal effect matters as much as the technical one. If the protocol limits embedded data to 83-byte fragments, the “knowing possession” defense becomes overwhelming. No prosecutor is going to argue with a straight face that an 83-byte hex string constitutes possession of illegal content. The protocol design itself becomes the legal defense.” Legendary cypherpunk Nick Szabo agrees and adds that the same protocol design that used to protect the network could work against it in a post-Core v30 world: “Arbitrary content on blockchains makes them far more risky, legally and morally, to operate, than with blockchains confined to financial transactions. Running a node where one cannot selectively delete unacceptable content without wider functional disruption is also far riskier than running data services where one can selectively delete unacceptable content without causing wider functional disruption.” If an ungodly image or video sneaks into the network, it will be there forever. The traitors at Bitcoin Core opened the floodgates for this kind of material and started this whole mess. The Bitcoin network’s immunity system needs to close them ASAP. This is not a drill. Exhibit E: The Game Theory Behind BIP-110, An Analysis So, if BIP-110 is absolutely necessary, why aren’t big mining pools signaling for its activation? Let’s turn to mathematician Melvin Carvalho’s analysis of the game theory behind the soft fork for an explanation: “a common mistake is reading current signaling data as a prediction of outcome. It isn't. Miners have zero incentive to signal months in advance, and every incentive to wait.” ¿ To understand why, Mr. Carvalho gives us a history lesson: “This is exactly what happened with SegWit activation in 2017. Months of political deadlock. Low signaling. Observers declared it dead. Then BIP91 created a deadline, and miners flipped from ~30% to lock-in within a single retarget period. The entire drama resolved in roughly two weeks once the deadline forced action.” Why would mining pools and exchanges flip the bit in the first place, though? Well, “the cost of upgrading is trivial: swap a node binary, restart. The cost of being on the wrong side of a chain split is existential.” Every node will accept BIP-110 blocks, but over 20% of nodes currently signaling for the soft fork will not allow blocks containing gigantic OP_RETURNs, OP_FALSE OP_IF envelopes, or OP_SUCCESS exploits. Plus, no one wants a chain split or a PoW algorithm change.That leads us to the mathematician’s conclusion: “BIP-110's activation mechanism is well-designed for its stated goal. The asymmetric payoff (zero cost to signal, real cost if caught not-signaling), the first-mover advantage, the ratchet effect through mandatory signaling, and subsidy dominance over inscription fees create a powerful coordination mechanism where the financial case against signaling effectively doesn't exist. A 55% threshold is aggressive by Bitcoin standards, but defensible for a temporary measure.” Of course, this is just a summary. Read the whole analysis for Mr. Carvalho’s step-by-step reasoning. And let’s hope he’s right and BIP-110 activates smoothly.*This was a dispatch by Eduardo Prospero, Bitcoin’s ambassador to HackerNoon.