The Bitcoin Beacon
BIP-110 would cap the data that Ordinals and tokens can bury in Bitcoin's blocks. With its August activation window closing, almost no miners are signaling for it.
Every few years Bitcoin holds an argument about what it is for, and the argument is having its turn again. The flashpoint is BIP-110, a proposed “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork” that would tighten how much arbitrary data a transaction can carry. Its backers see a defense of Bitcoin as money; its opponents see a censorship rule dressed as spring cleaning. With days left before a self-imposed August activation window, the vote that matters — miners — has barely registered.
BIP-110 targets the mechanisms that Ordinals inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens and Runes have used to store images, text and token data on the blockchain. It would limit new transaction outputs to 34 bytes, cap OP_RETURN payloads at 83 bytes, restrict data pushes inside scripts to 256 bytes, and forbid the use of Taproot annex fields. In plain terms, it narrows the pipes that let people treat Bitcoin's ledger as a general-purpose data store rather than a record of payments.
Supporters argue that block space is a shared resource and that filling it with non-monetary data raises fees and bloats the chain that every full node must carry. Critics counter that a fee-paying transaction is a fee-paying transaction, that miners are free to include whatever pays, and that deciding some data is illegitimate is exactly the kind of gatekeeping Bitcoin was built to resist.
The plan relies on a modified user-activated soft fork scheduled for August 2026, with an early lock-in if 55% of mined blocks signal support. That threshold is not close. Network trackers put miner signaling for BIP-110 at roughly 0.92% of blocks — well under one in a hundred. Bitcoin Core, the dominant node software, declined to merge the code, which means even a groundswell would face a client that does not ship it.
A soft fork with 0.92% miner support is not a policy. It is a petition.
The opposition is unusually well-known. Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor published a broadside titled “110 Reasons BIP 110 Is a Bad Idea,” arguing the change adds risk without settling the underlying dispute. PlanB, the analyst behind the stock-to-flow model, came out against it on censorship grounds. Macro analyst Lyn Alden has warned that a contested activation could trigger a chain split in August — the outcome institutional holders fear most, because it forces exchanges, custodians and miners to pick a side and can briefly produce two competing versions of the ledger.
It would be unfair to paint BIP-110 as fringe vandalism. Its authors are responding to a real change: since 2023, inscriptions and token protocols have at times dominated block space and driven fee spikes that price out ordinary payments — the very use case circular economies from Costa Rica to Ghana depend on. A chain optimized for monetary transactions is a defensible vision, and quietly capping junk data is a milder intervention than many past fork fights. The disagreement is less about whether spam is a problem than about who gets to define spam, and whether writing that judgment into consensus rules is worth the risk of splitting the network.
The near-term signal is the miner-signaling rate as the August window approaches. A move from under 1% toward the 55% bar would be a genuine surprise; continued flatlining effectively ends the proposal for this cycle. Either way, the episode is a reminder of how Bitcoin actually changes: not by decree from its most famous holders, but by the slow, awkward coordination of the people who run the software and mine the blocks.
Editor's note: signaling percentages move block to block; figures reflect trackers cited above at the time of writing. Nothing here is financial advice.
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