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A Layman's Guide to BIP-110

A Layman's Guide to BIP-110

February 28, 2026

This post is a free translation of the explanation of why BIP-110 is reckless and doomed to fail, written by Jameson Lopp. Feel free to read the official article below:

https://blog.lopp.net/a-laymans-guide-to-bip-110/

A Layman’s Guide to BIP-110

February 23, 2026 - 20 min bitcoin read

BIP-110 is a proposed temporary soft fork aimed at limiting arbitrary data in Bitcoin transactions to “protect” Bitcoin as money by reducing what proponents consider “spam.” It is presented as a way to reduce the burden on node operators and “kick out unwanted scammers” from the network, but in reality, it is a misguided and risky overreaction that would cause far more harm than good. If you want to read the technical details of the BIP, you can do so here.

The short version of the specification is that it adds 7 new restriction rules on what makes bitcoin transactions valid, limiting the amount of data that can be placed in certain areas of a transaction and preventing the use of certain opcodes (functions).

This BIP has several problems and points of controversy.

1. High risk of chain splits.

BIP-110 activation depends on a low threshold of 55% miner signaling for a User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF)1. This considerably increases the chances of a “chain split” in which there are 2 competing chains vying to be “the real Bitcoin.” During a chain split scenario, you should expect the entire ecosystem to freeze as a result of uncertainty over which fork will win and the resulting risks of double spends. Does that sound like “sound money” to you? The last time we had a chain split without replay protection (where transactions are valid on both forks) was in 2013! In 2017, we came within about a month of having such a chain split with SegWit2X and I was on the front lines working to prepare BitGo’s infrastructure to handle it safely — it was a nightmare and we all breathed a sigh of relief when the fork was canceled.

Unlike previous soft forks, where old nodes accepted new blocks, BIP-110 nodes reject non-compliant blocks outright, also increasing the risk of chain split.

2. Confiscatory rule changes can freeze funds.

The proposal invalidates certain Taproot2 features and limits data pushes. This could render some pre-existing UTXOs unspendable if they rely on now-invalid paths.

Although it exempts pre-activation UTXOs, edge cases like pre-signed transactions or experimental Tapleaves could lock up funds. There is no way to be certain how many wallets could be affected. And while BIP-110 is a forward-compatible soft fork from a node perspective, this is NOT the case for wallets that use the functionality BIP-110 prohibits. In other words, this BIP imposes an obligation on wallet developers.

3. Damages Bitcoin’s reputation.

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.

4. Subjective rule restrictions are unnecessary.

Spam is, by definition, low-value garbage. Spam is already mitigated by the block size limit and the open market for block space.

Bitcoin has been targeted by a wide variety of spam transaction attacks over the years. None of them have been sustainable in high-fee environments. A large part of the problem in recent years regarding spam is that fees are at all-time lows because almost nobody is using the Bitcoin blockchain and therefore we are not creating the fee pressure that would drive out most spam.

History of Bitcoin transaction and dust spam storms

5. Divides the ecosystem.

BIP-110 has zero miner support so far, but proponents continue with User Activated Soft Fork rhetoric. As I will explain later, game theory is not on their side, but they keep doubling down on extremism.

BIP-110 ignores Bitcoin’s decentralized governance: changes need broad buy-in, not node-counting games. Bitcoin is not a democracy where a simple majority can override the minority. And, as we shall see, BIP-110 has nowhere near a majority of anything.

I won’t go so far as to say BIP-110 is an attack on Bitcoin, because that’s essentially a meaningless claim. I think its (human) supporters genuinely believe they are fighting a just war to save Bitcoin from spammers, scammers, and undesirables.

6. Restricts future innovation.

Restrictions imposed on Taproot hinder advanced features like BitVM3 or complex covenants.

Admitted compromises in the BIP: no upgrade hooks available for other soft forks to occur, possible breakage of Miniscript.

7. Slippery slope toward centralization and control.

Both sides seem to agree that fighting spam is an endless cat-and-mouse game.

If successful, it encourages more reactionary forks to “kick out bad actors,” which goes against the ethos of Bitcoin as a neutral network where adversaries can operate without fear of being censored.

8. Actually increases rather than reduces legal and regulatory risks.

By trying to filter “bad” data, it actually invites more regulatory pressure — if government authorities believe Bitcoin can be changed by pressuring a few entities, they will almost certainly try to do so. Neutrality protects the network — selective censorship does not.

9. Node operation cost is already constrained by the block size limit.

Proponents claim it reduces node costs and refocuses on money, but the evidence is anecdotal. Bitcoin has operated perfectly with arbitrary data for over a decade.

My own node sync performance tests continue to show there is room for software-level improvements to make syncing faster, and sync times (full validation) tend to be roughly aligned with blockchain growth, which is linearly constrained.

2025 Bitcoin Node Performance Tests

Remember that the absolute worst case would add 210 GB of data to the blockchain every year, which at current prices costs between $2 and $40 depending on the type of hard drive. In practice, expect more like 100 GB per year, so $1 to $20 in hard drive cost.

There are also a variety of benchmark examples where you can see that Bitcoin node performance tends to improve over time due to the hard work of developers finding optimizations.

Bitcoin Core Performance Evolution

10. Calling the BIP temporary is laughable.

First of all, this BIP has been marketed as an “emergency fix” by its proponents from the start. The original BIP wording warned that “rejecting this softfork may subject you to legal or moral consequences,” which I pointed out as inappropriate 4 months ago during discussions on the developer mailing list. Why, tell me, would a fix for an existential crisis need to be only temporary?

I believe this was done to ignore all the technical objections to the functionality it breaks, so that proponents can say any major breakage will have minimal damage. Temporary, my eye. I recall an old proverb:

“There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.”

A one-year expiration probably sounds moderate to a layperson, but it actually adds complexity and uncertainty:

  • Wallets, libraries, and contract protocols now need to reason about two sets of rules (during the year vs. after expiration).

  • Developers building forward-looking tools must guess whether the limits will be extended, replaced, or removed, creating exactly the kind of coordination fog that Bitcoin’s conservative upgrade philosophy tries to avoid.

Nobody I’ve talked to believes the puritan fanatics behind the BIP-110 proposal would be content to simply let it expire after a year. They tend to favor even more extreme restrictions like “The Cat”, which would impose much more complex and dynamic restrictions on which attributes make a transaction sufficiently “non-monetary” to be disallowed. This “temporary” rhetoric seems to be a purely political move.

11. Does not prevent embedding arbitrary data.

This BIP only starts an endless cat-and-mouse game and was immediately proven ineffective by Peter Todd when he embedded the entire BIP text into a BIP-110-compliant transaction. (BIP-110 was originally called BIP-444)

BIP-110 is a reckless bet that prioritizes short-term “purity” over Bitcoin’s long-term resilience. It won’t kill spam, but it could kill trust, innovation, and unity.

Recklessness

I have previously covered a variety of reasons why Knots is and has been a recklessly developed project, and BIP-110 development has been, unsurprisingly, more of the same.

Knots Is Not a Serious Project

A Bitcoin Core developer found a fatal consensus bug that went unnoticed for months (because these people are way out of their depth.)

Do not ignore the mandatory activation at block height 961,632: blocks that do not signal bit 4 will be rejected as invalid. This is not a neutral, low-drama deployment stance. It is dogmatic bullying: “enforce our rules or your blocks will be orphaned by our nodes.” You can argue that UASF is a valid tactic, but you cannot pretend it is low-risk, because it increases the chance of a messy coordination failure if the ecosystem is not aligned.

Proponents will point to the 2017 UASF to claim it is safe, but readers should note that the 2017 UASF was never triggered because SegWit ended up being activated via MASF (miner activated soft fork) instead of UASF.

On a more meta level, BIP-110 is an attempt to create a technical solution for a cultural problem. That is just one of the countless reasons it is NOT really a solution. Its proponents openly admit it does not solve “spam” — supporters are under the illusion that simply designing a new “anti-spam narrative” into the protocol will “scare away” people whose actions they disapprove of. It is a “cut off your nose to spite your face” approach to developing a censorship-resistant system. It has been a long road to this schism, and I chronicled much of the history 3 years ago:

A History of Bitcoin Maximalism

One particular line from the above article stands out:

Some maximalists are puritans who hate seeing block space used for anything beyond transferring bitcoin from one address to another. Others are more than happy to pay for block space that stores arbitrary data.

Bitcoin has a sect of moral crusaders who have been on a relentlessly increasing purity spiral for many years. Andreas perfectly predicted how this would play out:

Refuting False Narratives

Supporters like to point out that over 20% of Bitcoin nodes are running Knots in protest against Bitcoin Core’s stance on spam. What they conveniently fail to discuss is that a bunch of nodes signaling support for things without having any economic weight behind the node (such as processing transactions and providing other services for users) means it is merely a Sybil attack. In other words, it is bravado meant to trick observers into thinking the signals have strength when they actually do not.

Running a node does not require skin in the game — you lose nothing by running a node that signals support for a change that fails. Likewise, running a node has negligible cost. Some may say it costs hundreds of dollars to run a minimally viable node, but that is the naive answer. In reality, someone who knows what they are doing can easily run thousands of reachable “nodes” on a single desktop. The main “cost” that comes into play is around network addresses. IPv4 addresses are the most expensive, IPv6 are cheaper, and tor addresses are practically free. I wrote this script to query bitnodes’ list of reachable peers and ran it at the time of publication:

NetworkAll Knots NodesBIP-110 NodesNon-Knots Nodes
IPv41,1284036,255
IPv6109331,277
tor4,0471,43810,845

I find it interesting that among non-Knots nodes there is a 1.7:1 ratio of tor to IPv4, while among Knots nodes it is 3.6:1. Perhaps this is because there are many plebeians running node-in-a-box solutions that configure tor automatically and users do not set up port forwarding on the router. This could also indicate a Sybil attack by people wanting to inflate their numbers. In general, counting nodes is silly, but if you insist on doing it, recognize that the strength of ANY signal is only relative to the cost of creating it, and the cost of creating tor addresses is effectively zero.

There is also a strange narrative being spread that BIP-110 could succeed even with minority hashrate, which Murch debunks in this thread:

By the way, I’ll leave this here since the false narrative continues to perpetuate itself even after being refuted a year ago.

I have no financial incentive to be against BIP-110. BIP-110 is antithetical to an aspect of Bitcoin I have been writing about for A DECADE: the ability to act as a trusted anchor for other systems.

Bitcoin: The Trust Anchor in a Sea of Blockchains

Personally, I am ambivalent about how other people use block space. I believe our primary goal should be to build / discover enough valuable use cases to generate sustainable demand for block space, resulting in a robust block space market and thus generating sufficient fee revenue for miners to offset the ongoing reduction in the block subsidy. If we cannot achieve this, Bitcoin will have much bigger long-term problems than undesirable images / content encoded in the blockchain.

BIP-110 supporters will certainly point to this article and claim it is evidence that I am afraid their movement will win. No. I am writing this post so I do not have to repeat the same things over and over and because I like making controversial predictions that eventually prove correct. I will even prove my lack of fear in the next section.

Why BIP-110 Will Fail

No Miner Support

To activate “cleanly” without splitting the chain, a soft fork needs a supermajority of miners to enforce it. At the time of writing, miners signaling support are exactly… zero.

There is no rational reason for miners to WANT to support BIP-110, because it would only result in a REDUCTION of the transaction fees they collect. Why would anyone in their right mind voluntarily accept a pay cut?

As we can see in the chart at bitnod.es:

Declining support

Updated Chart 03-03-2026

Updated 03-03-2026

How does this compare to the controversial SegWit soft fork?

This proposal is so controversial that we have even seen a mining pool actively signaling against it. F2Pool manages a little over 10% of the network’s hashrate.

No Economic Support

Although there are many nodes signaling support, from what I can see, these nodes have no economic power whatsoever. A soft fork designed to reject miner blocks ONLY works if the nodes rejecting the blocks are nodes that the miner NEEDS to accept their coinbase rewards in order to “cash out” their money. To date, no BIP-110 proponent is willing to put their money where their mouth is. The FUD is tiresome and endless.

Along the same lines, I once again offer filter supporters the chance to prove their economic conviction and take my bitcoin if I am wrong.

BIP-110 Wager

A proof-of-concept contract (which will need to be audited and adjusted for mainnet) is available for review here. The above offer is open to ANYONE who wants to take the YES branch of the contract on the listed terms; feel free to contact me via the contact form. I am happy to make these bets publicly or privately, although I prefer them to be public to provide more economic signal to the world.

When the SegWit2X fork was approaching in 2017, several major exchanges like Bitfinex and HitBTC offered futures markets for people to bet on the outcome. However, I do not think we will see a single major exchange do this for this fork, because there simply is not enough interest to be worth the effort of setting up.

The only semi-liquid market is a small Lightning-based prediction market available here:

Will BIP-110 activate and be enforced on Bitcoin by Sept 1, 2026?

At the time of writing, the above market has seen only 0.22 BTC in volume and the odds give 98% chance that BIP-110 will fail to be the chain with the most cumulative proof-of-work.

Game theory is clear. Why would miners take actions to defect to a fork for which nobody is willing to buy futures? If you are holding BTC and do not participate in fork futures, you are effectively going 1X long on each side of the fork. It is a net neutral position that provides absolutely zero economic signal to miners.

BIP-110 supporters certainly seem irrational, but Bitmain also seemed so when it resisted SegWit activation. Only some time after the fork wars did we discover that Bitmain was anti-SegWit solely because it broke their ability to use covert ASICBoost, which gave them a massive efficiency advantage over other miners.

Thus, I am led to conclude that the true play of a rational BIP-110 supporter is to activate their fork via legal compulsion. Bitcoin has resisted legal attacks before; they will be costly, but the attackers will ultimately fail because a Bitcoin protocol captured by a nation-state is worthless. As such, many bitcoin holders are incentivized to fight against legal attacks.

BIP-110 advocates are trying to win through coercion because they cannot win through rational debate. And to be clear, the debate ended last year. They failed at “voice” and realized their only remaining option was “exit” — now there is little left to do but watch game theory unfold, point and laugh.

My Predictions

  1. As the August deadline approaches, BIP-110 supporters will become more desperate. I suspect it is only a matter of time before some crazy Knotzi puts child pornography on the blockchain as a desperate last-ditch measure to coerce miners and node operators via legal threats into adopting their poorly designed fork.

    We will know it is a Knotzi because a real pedophile would not be stupid enough to put their crimes on a transparent global ledger with terrible privacy characteristics.

    I am more surprised this has not happened already. When it does occur, it will not really harm Bitcoin, which already has a variety of illegal content encoded in the blockchain, but it will create another very annoying cycle of negative news. Remember that nocoiners love to latch onto any “bitcoin is for criminals” headline.

  2. BIP-110 will NOT reach the 55% activation threshold, and therefore nothing of consequence will occur until block 961,632 in early August. At that point, anyone running BIP-110 code will discover that their node has been forked off the Bitcoin network.

  3. If OCEAN is the only pool on the fork (which I consider likely) with about 1% of total hashrate, they will produce 1 or 2 blocks per day and it will take nearly 3 years to reach the next difficulty adjustment.

  4. In practice, rational miners are unlikely to remain on a minority fork for long because they will not be able to actually collect their coinbase rewards. With 2 blocks per day, it would take 50 days for a new block’s coinbase output to become spendable. And even after that, transferring to an exchange would probably take even longer, because exchanges would impose a very high confirmation count on a minority hashrate chain due to reorg risk.

Root Cause Analysis

My theory is that this movement was created by Luke & Mechanic as a marketing mechanism to get free press for OCEAN and thus gain more hashrate market share. It was brilliantly successful at the first goal, but failed miserably at the second because miners tend to be mercenaries rather than morally driven.

Ocean Hashrate

I also suspect OCEAN is desperate and its investors are quite irritated. They peaked at 2% of network hashrate in January and have fallen back to 1% recently. Perhaps all the posturing and threats of rejecting blocks from “impure miners” is not such a good marketing tactic after all?

OCEAN investors should be legitimately concerned that company leaders are spending serious effort intimidating other mining pools into complying with such a reckless proposal. I would not be surprised if Luke was hoping to be demoted / fired due to poor performance. That could also explain his extremism about “Bitcoin dying this year” / his departure from Bitcoin work — he may just be projecting the proverbial writing on the wall.

If all this is coming from OCEAN, you might ask, why so much “grassroots” movement?

BIP-110 Clanker

Just one of dozens of examples…

  1. Much of the movement is manufactured. I have confronted and debunked many AI bots on both X and nostr that were regurgitating BIP-110 talking points and basically trying to waste my time with circular arguments.

  2. Part of it is real people, exploiting the small group of puritan bitcoiners who are completely fixated on this issue. Some seem to be trying to become influencers, while others have simply been sucked in by the emotional, cult-like narrative.

  3. A common theme in all of the above is that they have no financial conviction in the movement’s success. They dismiss any offer of a financial bet as “immoral gambling” while simultaneously thinking they can economically coerce miners into doing what they want. This is, of course, completely illogical.

  4. The only logical explanation I can find for people continuing to posture with narratives but no economics is that they have deluded themselves into thinking that merely acting like aggressive jerks will “scare the spammers” and thus they do not actually NEED to succeed in enforcing their wishes at the protocol level, but can be content having “defended Bitcoin” at the “social” level.

What I Would Like to See Happen

I believe it would be good for OCEAN investors to inform management that they are not interested in the company being associated with a reckless cult that is leading many people to run off a figurative cliff by forking themselves onto a dead network on arrival. But, as they say, that is not my concern. I do not care what happens to OCEAN, I am worried about the unnecessary vitriol, conflict, and brain drain from the ecosystem.

It would also be helpful if other mining pools would proclaim their rejection of the BIP so we can move on faster without needing to watch block flags for the next 6 months.

Podcasters, conferences, and generally anyone on social media should stop spending time engaging with this ridiculous proposal and feeding it attention. BIP-110 proponents are just riding outrage marketing to try to stay at the center of community discussion. We passed the point of discussion long ago.

When I realized I was not talking to rational people, but to a cult based on emotional narratives, I put up a firewall to protect my time from endless circular arguments. I have done this before with BSV proponents (Cult of Craig Wright) and HEX (Cult of Richard Heart).

Since this schism is mainly ideological in nature, I do not expect resolution or reconciliation to occur. I would very much like BIP-110 proponents to fork off, but I fear they will NOT STAY forked and will come crawling back to keep whining that Bitcoin is “tainted by shitcoinery.”

Some people simply cannot handle the fact that things they disapprove of will happen on censorship-resistant networks, and they just want to be angry about it. Bitcoin is not just money, it is programmable money, and that comes with the ability to design use cases that some may consider non-monetary in nature. I am sick of arguing with people who do not accept reality.

This has happened before and will happen again.

Fork around and find out.

  1. A UASF is a Bitcoin soft fork activation coordinated on a specified date and enforced by full nodes rather than relying solely on miners. To function correctly, participating nodes must represent the so-called “economic majority” — users, exchanges, and businesses with significant influence over Bitcoin’s economy. A UASF requires development, industry, and user coordination. In the past, a UASF was successfully withdrawn for the activation of the P2SH soft fork (aka BIP16). On February 25, 2017, a contributor named Shaolin Fry proposed that UASF be used to activate Segregated Witness or SegWit and later published details in BIP148. User Activated Soft Fork - BitcoinWiki. Available at: https://bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/user-activated-soft-fork. Accessed: March 20, 2026. ↩︎

  2. Significant Bitcoin upgrade, activated in 2021, that improves privacy, efficiency, and smart contract support, making complex transactions more discreet and reducing costs on the network. ↩︎

  3. https://bitvm.org/ ↩︎

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