BIP-110 Is Dead. Bitcoin's Governance Just Answered Its Own Question.

BIP-110, the proposed one-year soft fork that would have restricted how much arbitrary data Bitcoin transactions could carry, effectively died this month after its minority chain split off on August 8, produced just two blocks in roughly eight hours, and stalled at an estimated 0.15% of the network's hashpower — far short of what it needed to survive, let alone displace the main chain.

The proposal, formally the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, would have capped most new output scripts at 34 bytes, limited OP_RETURN data fields to 83 bytes, and restricted data pushes to 256 bytes for about a year — rules aimed squarely at Ordinals inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, and Runes without naming them directly. Its mandatory signaling window opened on August 7 at block 961,632, and the chain split the following day when it became clear the 55% miner threshold needed for activation was never within reach. Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, who published a widely shared 110-point essay opposing the proposal in July, used the stall to make a broader point about Bitcoin's design: anyone can fork Bitcoin, he wrote, but without security, utility, capital, and users, a fork is irrelevant. At its current hashrate, Saylor estimated the minority chain would need roughly 25 years to reach its first difficulty adjustment.