BIP-110 Soft Fork Proposal Fails Due to Lack of Miner Support

The proposed BIP-110 soft fork aimed to restrict arbitrary data in Bitcoin transactions for one year, but it has effectively died. The proposal would have capped most new output scripts at 34 bytes and limited OP_RETURN data fields to 83 bytes. Despite its mandatory signaling window opening on August 7 at block 961,632, the chain split the following day when it became clear that the 55% miner threshold needed for activation was never within reach.

The minority chain produced only two blocks in roughly eight hours and stalled at an estimated 0.15% of the network's hashpower, far short of what it needed to survive, let alone displace the main chain. Blockstream co-founder Adam Back argued that the proposal's real danger wasn't Ordinals spam but the precedent of a consensus change that could invalidate valid, fee-paying transactions based on their content.

Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor wrote that turning a spam dispute into a content-based consensus rule sets a precedent more dangerous than the inscriptions it targets. He estimated that the minority chain would need roughly 25 years to reach its first difficulty adjustment. The underlying tension over what belongs on Bitcoin's blockspace hasn't gone away, but the next attempt will need a very different argument.