Bitcoin’s BIP 110 proposal nears deadline with minimal miner support amid growing debate
Bitcoin’s BIP 110 proposal, which seeks to limit the storage of non-financial data on the blockchain, is approaching an important activation deadline while receiving almost no support from miners. The proposal has sparked intense discussion within the Bitcoin community, but current signaling levels show widespread resistance.
Officially called the Reduced Data Temporary Soft Fork, BIP 110 focuses on a long-standing disagreement over how Bitcoin’s block space should be used.
Bitcoin transactions can carry payment information as well as additional data. The OP_RETURN field provides a way to include small amounts of extra information, while other methods involving scripts and witness data allow users to store larger pieces of content on-chain. These features have supported projects such as Ordinals, inscriptions, and token systems that embed images, text, and metadata into Bitcoin transactions.
The proposed change would place temporary restrictions on these data storage methods for one year. BIP 110 would reduce the OP_RETURN limit to earlier levels, prevent most arbitrary data entries larger than 256 bytes, and restrict certain script formats mainly used for storing information.
Supporters argue that the change would help keep Bitcoin focused on its original role as a financial settlement network, while reducing storage demands on node operators. Opponents say the proposal risks turning a debate over blockchain usage into a broader consensus dispute by deciding which types of transactions should be considered valid.
The proposal has faced criticism from several prominent Bitcoin voices. Michael Saylor, founder of Strategy, argued that converting a dispute over blockchain spam into a protocol-level change could create a larger threat than the issue itself. He warned that changing the rules for currently valid, fee-paying transactions could establish a dangerous precedent.
Adam Back, Blockstream’s co-founder and the creator of Hashcash, also pushed back against the proposal. He argued that Bitcoin’s decentralized structure does not allow a group of users to force a change on the wider network, suggesting that supporters of BIP 110 would need to create their own alternative chain if they want different rules.
Current adoption metrics show limited support for the proposal. Instead of following the traditional route of gaining overwhelming miner approval, BIP 110 relies on a user-activated soft fork model, where participating nodes enforce the change independently. The proposal requires a 55% miner signaling threshold, significantly lower than the 95% requirement used in many previous Bitcoin upgrades.
Despite that reduced threshold, miner participation has remained nearly nonexistent. Signaling has stayed below 1% and currently stands at zero, with no major mining pools supporting the change.
Support among nodes is also limited, remaining in the low single digits and largely driven by Bitcoin Knots users, an alternative implementation of Bitcoin software compared with the dominant Bitcoin Core.
The proposal’s timeline is moving forward regardless of the lack of broad adoption. The current signaling period runs between blocks 957,600 and 959,615, followed by a voluntary lock-in deadline at block 961,542, expected in early August.
If BIP 110 activates, nodes running the updated software would reject blocks that do not follow the new rules, with activation expected around September. However, because miner participation and node adoption remain extremely low, the result would likely be a split involving only a minority portion of the network rather than a universal Bitcoin upgrade.
Bitcoin’s governance model depends on voluntary agreement among thousands of independent participants, including miners, developers, node operators, and users. Major protocol changes only succeed when enough of the ecosystem chooses to adopt them.
The debate behind BIP 110 reflects a broader disagreement about Bitcoin’s future direction. While some participants believe increasing non-financial data usage threatens Bitcoin’s purpose as digital money, others argue that restricting valid transactions could undermine the network’s open and permissionless design.
For now, BIP 110’s lack of meaningful miner and node support suggests that the proposal has not achieved the broad consensus typically required for a major Bitcoin change.
