- Michael Saylor calls BIP-110 more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam itself.
- Adam Back warns BIP-110 risks fracturing Bitcoin’s community and consensus process.
A controversial Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP-110) has returned to the spotlight after two prominent figures in the Bitcoin community — Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor and Blockstream co-founder Adam Back — publicly criticized the proposal on X over the weekend.The criticism comes just weeks before BIP-110’s activation deadline.
What Saylor and Back Said
Both Bitcoin advocates criticized BIP-110 in separate posts on X, although their concerns focused on different aspects of the proposal.
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Saylor framed the issue as a dangerous precedent rather than a spam problem.
In his post, he argued that “there are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam” and warned that BIP-110 would transform a dispute over network usage into a consensus-level rule change.
He urged the community to save its energy for threats that really matter rather than pursue this fight.
Back’s criticism centered on decentralization and Bitcoin’s governance model. After listening to a discussion hosted by BIP-110 supporters, he said he became concerned that some advocates underestimated why the proposal had failed to gain broader support.
He described BIP-110 as an attempt to “police other people’s” transactions, arguing that Bitcoin users are free to modify their own software but cannot impose transaction restrictions on others without broad network consensus.
Back compared Bitcoin’s governance process to that of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), where technical changes succeed only when they achieve widespread agreement across stakeholders.
While acknowledging concerns about transaction spam, Back argued that restricting transaction content would conflict with Bitcoin’s censorship-resistant design.
What Does BIP-110 Aim to Change?
Introduced in December 2025 by pseudonymous contributor Dathon Ohm, with contributions from Bitcoin Knots maintainer Luke Dashjr, BIP-110 seeks to temporarily limit the use of Bitcoin block space for non-financial data storage.
The proposal aims to filter out what supporters describe as “spam,” including images, metadata and token-related protocols such as Ordinals, inscriptions and BRC-20s.
Supporters argue that these uses consume valuable block space, increase storage requirements for node operators and distract from Bitcoin’s primary role as a monetary network.
To achieve this, BIP-110 would introduce temporary consensus rules lasting approximately one year. The proposal would cap data pushes in scripts at 256 bytes, limit OP_RETURN capacity and restrict certain Taproot features commonly used to embed large amounts of data on-chain.
Support Falls Short of BIP-110 Activation Threshold
For activation, BIP-110 must secure support from more than 55% of block-validating nodes during a designated signaling period.
During the most recently assessed signaling window, support stood at roughly 1% — far below the required threshold.
Although the proposal’s activation deadline is set for Sept. 1, 2026, current trends suggest it is unlikely to secure sufficient support before then.
Why This Matters
The debate surrounding BIP-110 highlights a broader tension within Bitcoin’s governance: whether the network should remain strictly content-neutral or take a more active role in limiting non-financial uses of block space.