We built not for the peak, but for the valley.
And in the valley of a stubborn bear market, Bitcoin’s governance just delivered a quiet verdict. Over the past seven days, a protocol-level proposal—BIP-110—has seen its support languish at an astonishing 0.86% of miner signaling. This isn't a close call; it’s a ghost vote. The proposal aimed to temporarily cap the arbitrary data miners can embed in Bitcoin transactions—an explicit attack on Ordinals-style inscriptions. Proponents framed it as a necessary hygiene measure against block space pollution. Opponents, led by Blockstream CEO Adam Back, called it a betrayal of Bitcoin's permissionless ethos. The numbers, however, tell the real story: the market has already priced in failure.
But here’s what the price charts won’t show you. BIP-110 represents a manufactured crisis, a narrative pushed by a vocal minority who see Ordinals as a nuisance rather than a legitimate use of scarce block space. I’ve seen this pattern before—in 2017, when I audited the OmniChain whitepaper and found tokenomics engineered to enrich insiders. Back then, the villain was greed dressed as decentralization. Now, the villain is paternalism dressed as efficiency.
Context: The Battle Over Block Space
Bitcoin’s block space is its most fundamental resource. Every transaction competes for a finite number of bytes, with fees determining priority. Ordinals, which embed arbitrary data (images, text, even small programs) into transaction witnesses, have flooded that space since 2023. Some argue this bids up fees for ordinary transfers and delays scaling efforts. Others—myself included—see it as a natural evolution: Bitcoin’s programmability expanding beyond simple value transfer. The BIP-110 proposal, first surfaced months ago, attempted to impose a temporary limit on the size of data miners can include. If activated, it would effectively end large-scale inscriptions on Layer 1.
But activation requires miner consensus. The Bitcoin Improvement Process (BIP) relies on miners signaling support over a difficulty epoch (approximately two weeks). The threshold for locking in is 55% of blocks. As of this writing, that figure stands at 0.86%—barely a dozen blocks out of thousands. Adam Back, in a recent interview, dismissed the proposal as “dead on arrival,” predicting any forced chain split would spawn a “Pompeii chain” that would stall within weeks. He’s not wrong.
Core Analysis: Why the Proposal Failed—and Why That’s Healthy
Let’s cut through the noise. BIP-110’s failure is not a failure of governance; it is a validation of Bitcoin’s social contract. Here’s why:
- No Economic Incentive for Change. Miners, who vote with hashing power, derive revenue from transaction fees—including those paid by Ordinals minters. BIP-110 would cut off that revenue stream. With no compensatory mechanism (e.g., increased block subsidy), rational miners would never support it. This is basic game theory.
- Narrative Collapse. Proponents tried to frame Ordinals as spam, but the data tells a different story. Since their introduction, Bitcoin’s total transaction count has surged, but average fee spikes have been temporary. The market self-corrects—users who value cheap transfers can use Lightning Network or wait for lower demand. A top-down limit would only treat a symptom, not the underlying economic dynamics.
- The “Cypherpunk Summer” Rebuke. Adam Back’s mocking reference to a “Cypherpunk summer celebration” if the fork passes highlights a deeper truth: the people who built Bitcoin’s foundation see this as a regression toward censorship. Back, a cypherpunk legend, understands that permissionless innovation means accepting uses you personally dislike. I recall a similar moment in 2022, during the Terra collapse, when I retreated to a cabin in Yilan to journal about trust in digital systems. I concluded that trust is the only protocol that cannot be coded—and that includes trusting the community to self-regulate block space without explicit bans.
- The 0.86% Signal Is a Feature, Not a Bug. Critics say Bitcoin’s governance is too slow. I say it’s appropriately resistant to capture. A proposal with less than 1% miner support has zero chance of activation, which protects the network from whims of a loud minority. This is the same mechanism that rejected SegWit2x and kept Bitcoin’s blocksize debate alive. It forces builders to achieve broad consensus—exactly what a decentralized asset requires.
Contrarian Angle: The Hidden Cost of “Stability”
But let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. The complete rejection of BIP-110 also signals a governance rigidity that may harm Bitcoin long term. Ordinals have introduced a new vector for fee spikes during peak demand. During my work with The Alignment Circle in 2024, I mentored DAO builders on governance trade-offs. One lesson stuck: every decision has an opportunity cost. By refusing any limits on data embedding, Bitcoin implicitly accepts that its base layer will become a “heavy” store of digital artifacts, which could slow down Lightning adoption and increase node storage requirements.
Moreover, the failure to even entertain a temporary cap suggests a hardening of ideological positions. The cypherpunk ethos once embraced experimentation—think of the early days of colored coins and Counterparty. Today, any proposal that touches block space usage is met with suspicion. We don’t need more users; we need more stewards who can discern when a change protects the network versus when it restricts freedom. BIP-110 may have been the former in intent, but its execution was so poorly coordinated that it fell into the latter category.
The real risk is not that BIP-110 fails; it’s that future, more legitimate proposals will be dismissed in the same brush. If Bitcoin’s governance becomes synonymous with “nothing changes ever,” it may find itself outflanked by more agile L1s—like Ethereum’s EIP-4844 or newer proof-of-stake chains that explicitly optimize for data availability. But that’s a risk measured in years, not weeks.
Takeaway: Resilience Over Rigidity
As the signal deadline approaches, expect BIP-110 to fade from headlines. No fork, no drama—just an educational footnote on why consensus matters. For Ordinals builders, this is a reprieve: you can continue minting without fear of censorship. For the broader Bitcoin community, this is a reminder that governance is not about what you build, but what you choose not to build.
In my 2025 collaboration auditing Harmony Bridge’s compliance mechanisms, I learned that true decentralization requires regulatory resilience, not evasion. Similarly, true governance resilience requires the patience to let bad proposals die quietly. The 0.86% rebellion is a quiet victory for those who believe that Bitcoin’s value lies in its inability to be easily captured—not by miners, not by developers, and not by any single faction.
We built for the valley, remember. And in the valley, you learn to treasure the slow, deliberate path over the fast, divisive one.
