BIP-110 Mandatory Signaling Window Opens Amid Uncertainty Over Proposal's Future
The Bitcoin network is at a critical juncture as it enters a mandatory signaling window for BIP-110, a proposal to restrict transaction data. The measure has garnered only 2.6% miner support, far short of the 55% supermajority required for lock-in. This means that any node running Bitcoin Knots, the alternative software client that ships with BIP-110 enforcement, will reject every block that fails to set version bit 4.
The proposal's author, Dathon Ohm, has urged miners and users to install Bitcoin Knots and abandon Bitcoin Core entirely. However, prominent critics such as Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy (MSTR), which holds 842,138 Bitcoin, believe that the BIP-110 nodes will reject non-signaling blocks, rendering the proposal irrelevant.
The situation has left everyday Bitcoin holders with a practical question: whether they will end up with coins on two incompatible chains. If BIP-110 enforcement nodes follow a minority chain while the economic majority continues on the non-signaling chain, exchanges and custodians will face decisions about which chain to treat as the canonical Bitcoin.