Michael Saylor, Executive Chairman of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) and one of Bitcoin’s most prominent corporate advocates, has weighed in on the apparent failure of BIP-110, a contentious proposal that split a small breakaway chain from Bitcoin this week. In a post on X on August 9, Saylor said “Bitcoin worked exactly as designed,” noting that the proposal “was free to fork, and the network was free not to follow.” By his account, about 99.85% of Bitcoin’s hashpower, its mining computing power, remained on the main chain, while the BIP-110 branch “mined only two blocks and is already more than 80 blocks behind.”
Those figures track with data cited by analysts: the BIP-110 minority chain attracted roughly 0.15% of total hashpower after splitting off, and stalled almost immediately. But while Saylor framed the outcome as vindication of Bitcoin’s consensus model, the episode leaves unresolved the underlying dispute that produced it, and reopens a long-running debate about how decisions actually get made on the network.
What Is BIP-110?
BIP-110, formally the “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork,” is a proposed Bitcoin soft fork, a backward-compatible rule change, that would restrict how much arbitrary, non-financial data a transaction can carry, for a trial period of about one year. Its rules cap most new transaction outputs at 34 bytes, limit the OP_RETURN data field to 83 bytes, and restrict data pushes to 256 bytes. In practice, those limits target Ordinals inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, and similar uses that embed images, text, and other non-financial content on the blockchain.
The proposal was distributed mainly through Bitcoin Knots, an alternative version of Bitcoin’s node software, rather than Bitcoin Core, the implementation that runs across most of the network and did not adopt it. Ordinary bitcoin payments and Lightning Network transfers were designed to keep working under the rules, and existing coins would require no migration or special handling.
The Two Sides of the Data Debate
At its core, BIP-110 is the latest flashpoint in a dispute that has simmered since inscriptions took off in 2023. Supporters argue that Bitcoin’s limited block space should be reserved primarily for financial transactions, and that restricting non-financial data would reduce congestion, lower the cost of running a node, and reinforce Bitcoin’s role as sound money. To them, image and text data amounts to spam that raises fees for people actually sending payments.
Critics counter that anyone who pays the transaction fee has effectively bought the right to use that block space however they choose, and that miners and node operators should not be in the business of deciding which transactions are “legitimate.” From that view, BIP-110’s limits are a form of censorship. Neither camp had backed down heading into the proposal’s decisive window, and the disagreement is as much philosophical, about what Bitcoin is for, as it is technical.
The Contested Activation That Triggered the Split
What made BIP-110 a fork risk was less its content than its activation method. The proposal set a 55% miner-signaling threshold for a smooth, voluntary lock-in, far below the roughly 95% support associated with several earlier Bitcoin upgrades. Actual support never came close: only about 2.53% of blocks signaled for it in the prior difficulty period, and signaling had sat below 1% through mid-July.
With voluntary activation out of reach, the proposal fell back on a mandatory signaling window. Nodes enforcing BIP-110 were programmed to reject any block that did not signal support after block 961,632, even blocks carrying nearly all of the network’s computing power. That is what produced the split on August 8: enforcing nodes peeled away onto a separate chain built only from signaling blocks, while the vast majority of miners and Core users continued on the existing rules. Critics had warned that this coercive design, using code to reject the majority’s blocks, was the real danger, since software can enforce a rule but cannot manufacture hashpower or economic support.
How the Fork Fared
The result was stark. The breakaway chain drew roughly 0.15% of Bitcoin’s hashpower and produced just two blocks in about eight hours while the main chain advanced dozens of blocks, quickly falling more than 80 blocks behind. Because the minority chain inherited Bitcoin’s existing mining difficulty but has only a sliver of its hashpower, its blocks arrive extremely slowly.
That creates a compounding problem Saylor highlighted: to reach its first difficulty adjustment, which would make mining easier, the chain must complete a full period of roughly 2,015 more blocks at its current crawl. Saylor estimated that at about 0.15% of hashpower, that would take around 25 years. That projection is an estimate based on the hashpower at the time and could change sharply if miners move onto or off the chain, but it underscores why analysts describe the fork as having no realistic path forward on current numbers. Technically, the proposal’s mandatory window runs through block 963,647, so the deployment is not formally concluded, but its momentum has effectively collapsed.
Saylor’s Take and the Governance Question
Saylor used the outcome to make a broader argument about Bitcoin governance. “Anyone can fork Bitcoin,” he wrote. “Without security, utility, capital, and users, a fork is irrelevant. Consensus is earned, not declared.” When another user suggested the episode proved that “miners control Bitcoin,” Saylor pushed back, arguing that “virtually all the miners, exchanges, custodians, wallets, holders, markets, and economic infrastructure chose Bitcoin over BIP-110.” His conclusion: “Nobody controls Bitcoin. Consensus emerges from the network.”
It is worth noting Saylor’s vantage point, as chairman of the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, he is a deeply interested and consistently bullish voice, and his framing casts the outcome in the most favorable light for the status quo. Others reading the same events draw different lessons: some see confirmation that entrenched interests and the existing economic majority can repel changes regardless of their merits, while BIP-110’s backers may argue the fight was never a fair test given how the debate was structured. What the episode does illustrate is that changing Bitcoin’s rules requires broad agreement across miners, node operators, businesses, and users, and that a determined minority, even with working code, cannot force a change the rest of the network declines to adopt.
A Note on Replay Risk
The split also carries a practical hazard for users. Because both chains currently accept identical transactions and the fork lacks replay protection, a transaction signed to send coins on the BIP-110 chain can also be valid on the main Bitcoin chain. In practice, that means a buyer of the fork’s coins could rebroadcast the same signed transaction on Bitcoin and collect real BTC from the same seller, a replay-style risk that makes the fork coins difficult to handle safely. Bitcoin Core developer Jon Atack had advised users to pause transfers around the split block, citing the possibility of short chain reorganizations. Holders should be cautious about transacting until the situation settles.
The Bottom Line
On the current numbers, BIP-110 has failed to gain the support it needed and its breakaway chain appears stranded. But the dispute that drove it, over whether Bitcoin’s block space should carry non-financial data, remains unresolved and is likely to resurface.
Saylor casts the outcome as Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism working exactly as intended; others see a more complicated picture of how power and agreement operate on the network. Either way, the data debate is not going away, and it is separate from another, unrelated fork on the horizon: Paul Sztorc’s eCash hard fork, targeting a split around August 21, which comes with its own distinct and contested design.
Also Read: Bitcoin Mining Squeeze: Nearly 23% of Mainstream Miners Are Operating at Loss
