Jan3 & Pixelmatic CEO Samson Mow has written the sharpest piece of criticism the BIP-110 debate has produced so far, and he did it as fiction. His long-form post on X, framed as a diary entry from a survivor of the “real Bitcoin” three years after activation, has done in a few thousand words what 110-point essays and node dashboards have failed to do.
It has forced the fork’s supporters to argue against a scenario they have no clean rebuttal for, because every satirical detail is anchored to a real data point already in the record.
With the mandatory signaling window opening in early August and activation targeted for block 965,664 around September 1, the timing is not accidental.
The 83-User Punchline is a Real Signaling Number in Disguise
Mow opens the story with a headcount. There were 159 users at activation. Three years later, 83 remain, the exact byte cap BIP-110 places on OP_RETURN outputs.
Read as fiction, that is a dark joke. Read as analysis, it is a direct hit on the fork’s already collapsing base of real support. Miner signaling for BIP-110 has sat below 1% for most of 2026, moving between 0.31% and 0.91% according to a report by The Crypto Times, with nearly all supporting blocks originating from Ocean, the pool co-founded by BIP-110 backer Luke Dashjr. No large mining pool has signaled. F2Pool co-founder Wang Chun has publicly condemned the proposal.
Casa CSO Jameson Lopp has spent months arguing the node-side numbers are worse than they look. In a post captioned “Spot the Sybil Attack”, he showed BIP-110 signaling nodes climbing sharply while Bitcoin Knots adoption whipsawed, arguing that Tor node addresses are “practically free” to spin up at scale. Mow’s 83 is fiction only in the sense that the number is written down. The direction is already visible in the data.
The Vibe-Coded Wallet is the Governance Argument
The plot hinges on an 84-byte OP_RETURN the narrator did not type. A mobile wallet built by a character named Dathon, a transparent reference to BIP-110’s pseudonymous author Dathon Ohm, pushed the extra byte through after being “vibe coded” with an AI prompt to “make it clean and monetary, no spam.”
This is where the satire stops being funny and starts being technical. Consensus-level data limits, Mow is arguing, do not fail when someone maliciously stuffs a block. They fail when a developer ships buggy software, when a wallet emits an unintended byte, when the network confuses accidents with sabotage.
Michael Saylor made a similar argument without the story around it. In his 110-point essay against the proposal, the Strategy chairman wrote that “the proposed cure is more dangerous than the condition,” warning that consensus-level censorship of valid, fee-paying transactions creates precedents that outlive the year-long soft fork.
Saylor’s earlier line, from a widely circulated X post, was blunter: BIP-110 “turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions. That precedent is the danger.”
Mow’s wallet is that precedent, dressed as a plot point.
Rented Hashrate and Difficulty Math That Actually Adds Up
The narrator waits 34 hours for a block. Mow says the fictional chain runs on roughly half a percent of hashrate, all rented, mercenary, and paid by the hour. Salvation, a difficulty adjustment, lies 2,000 blocks away, which at the current pace “lands sometime in the next decade.”
This is not creative license. Bitcoin difficulty retargets every 2,016 blocks, and a chain running at a fraction of a percent of network hashrate would in fact face block times measured in hours, not minutes, until the adjustment fired.
The math is why Blockstream CEO Adam Back has spent months warning that activating BIP-110 through a User Activated Soft Fork with under 5% support does not upgrade Bitcoin; it forks a minority chain off it.
Back’s public warning, delivered across multiple posts, is that BIP-110 supporters risk waking up on a chain that struggles to produce blocks and cannot economically defend itself. Mow has just written what that morning looks like.
Excommunication By Podcast is the Culture Critique
Mow’s dystopia is not run by code. It is run by personality. A “Great Maintainer” operates 21 all-seeing nodes and maintains lists. Podcaster Kratter, a reference to Matt Kratter, is recording a two-hour episode titled with the narrator’s transaction ID. A defector named Arthur, ostracized for using nLockTime, an original Bitcoin feature, is invoked only to warn children. The closing line puts Bitcoin educator Mechanic outside the narrator’s window.
This is Mow’s second-order argument, and it is the one that connects the story to his earlier public writing. In his September 2025 essay “The Bitcoin Alliance,” Mow argued the network’s participants should think of themselves as an alliance rather than a coercive community, noting that during the Blocksize Wars “the small block camp never had to coerce anyone to join.”
The satire is what happens when that norm collapses. It is not aimed at the code BIP-110 ships. It is aimed at the enforcement culture that would run the chain BIP-110 creates.
F2Pool’s Wang Chun has said the quiet part out loud, calling BIP-110 supporters a “digital cult” led by Dashjr as its “spiritual leader.” Mow’s story is the same charge, dramatized.
Why the Timing Points to the August 7 Signaling Window
BIP-110’s mandatory signaling window opens around block 961,632, expected in the first week of August. Blocks that fail to signal during that window get rejected by enforcing nodes, guaranteeing lock-in by block 963,648 and activation at 965,664 near September 1. The rules would expire roughly a year later, after 52,416 blocks.
Bitcoin Core has confirmed it will not integrate BIP-110. Bitcoin Knots, the client maintained by Dashjr, will enforce it. If the current 0.3% to 1% signaling rate holds into the window, the mechanism forces the conclusion Adam Back has been warning about for months: a minority chain that self-forks without ecosystem economic backing.
Mow’s post is not a research note, but it is doing the work of one. It compresses the same argument Saylor delivered in 110 bullet points, the same technical warning Back has issued repeatedly, and the same node-count skepticism Lopp has built with charts, into a single scenario a general reader can hold in their head. Fiction has a compression rate that dashboards do not.
Analyst Take
BIP-110 is losing on the metrics that matter: hashrate signaling near zero, no major mining pool support, no Bitcoin Core integration, and an economic majority that has stayed silent or actively opposed, what its opponents have lacked until this weekend is a piece of communication that makes the stakes legible outside the developer conversation.
That is what Mow has now delivered. The 83-user chain, the 84-byte wallet bug, the rented hashrate, the excommunication podcast, and the Great Maintainer’s lists are not predictions. They are the current signaling data, governance culture, and activation math, restated as a plot. Whether or not BIP-110 crosses the August signaling window, Mow has given the opposition a piece of writing that will be quoted long after the block heights are settled.
Also Read: 110 Reasons: Michael Saylor’s Case Against Bitcoin’s BIP 110
