The claim was precise: ‘BIP-110 failed.’ It was presented as a fact, a cornerstone of a larger argument about Bitcoin’s governance. But when I traced the paper trail—the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal repository, the mailing list archives, the developer forums—the narrative began to crack. The BIP-110 that was described as a failed attempt to filter ‘spam’ transactions does not align with the historical record. The actual BIP-110, proposed in 2015, concerned a change to the difficulty adjustment algorithm. It was not about spam. It was not even about transaction policy. The gap between the story and the code is not a typo. It is a signal.
This is not an isolated error. It is a pattern in the current governance theater surrounding Bitcoin’s block space. Over the past 7 days, the community has been fixated on a supposed ideological battle between ‘spam purists’—those who want to restrict non-financial transactions like Ordinals—and the pragmatists who accept any fee-paying transaction. The flashpoint was a public statement from David Schwartz, Ripple’s former CTO, who dismissed the purists with a single line: ‘The network doesn’t care about your opinion.’ He referenced the failure of BIP-110 as evidence that the purist agenda was already rejected. But the BIP he cited is a ghost. Its invocation reveals more about the state of governance than any technical proposal ever could.
To understand the mechanics, I must first define the protocol context. Bitcoin’s governance is not a formal system. There is no foundation, no board, no voting mechanism. The BIP process is the closest thing to a standard: anyone can propose a change, and the community adopts it through rough consensus. The threshold for ‘failure’ is not a vote; it is the absence of adoption. When a BIP is said to have failed, it means the node operators, miners, and application developers did not implement it. This is a feature, not a bug. The network is designed to resist change unless the change is overwhelmingly supported. But this same resistance creates a vacuum for narrative manipulation. A BIP that is merely unpopular can be rebranded as ‘failed’ to serve a rhetorical purpose. That is what happened here.
The core insight is that the invocation of BIP-110 is a rhetorical marker, not a technical fact. It signals ideological alignment. The speaker—whether David Schwartz or the news outlet that amplified his statement—is using a historical artifact to validate a present-day position. The actual content of BIP-110 is irrelevant. What matters is that the ‘spam purists’ are portrayed as having lost a battle in the past, and therefore their current arguments are moot. This is a classic logical fallacy: an appeal to history that ignores the fundamental differences in the current network state. The network state today is not the same as in 2015. Block space is more contested. Fee markets are more volatile. The Ordinals protocol has introduced a new class of non-financial data that challenges the original vision of Bitcoin as a pure payment system. The debate is not about the same thing.
From my experience auditing smart contracts and observing protocol governance, I have seen how ‘s unintended consequences’ of a failed BIP can be more telling than the BIP itself. The failure of BIP-110 (the real one, about difficulty adjustment) was a minor event. It was superseded by other proposals. But the narrative that a BIP-110 about spam failed is a fabrication that serves a purpose: it delegitimizes the purist position without engaging with its technical merits. The purist argument is not inherently wrong. It rests on a valid concern: non-financial transactions can congest the network, raise fees for ordinary users, and increase the mempool size. The counterargument is that the fee market is the proper arbiter, and any fee-paying transaction is legitimate. Both sides have technical weight. The BIP-110 myth bypasses this weight by implying the issue is settled.
The second layer of analysis is the role of David Schwartz. He is a respected engineer, co-creator of the XRP Ledger consensus algorithm, and a former member of the early Bitcoin mailing list. His intervention matters because of his credibility. But his credibility also masks a conflict of interest. Schwartz has spent years defending the XRP Ledger against accusations of centralization. The XRP Ledger’s governance is more centralized than Bitcoin’s: the Ripple foundation and core team drive upgrades. By criticizing Bitcoin’s governance as inefficient, he is implicitly defending his own ecosystem’s approach. The statement ‘BIP-110 failed’ is a weapon in a cross-ecosystem rivalry. It is not a neutral observation. The unintended consequence of this rhetorical war is that it hardens positions and reduces the space for technical compromise. The purists become more entrenched, the pragmatists more dismissive, and the actual problem—how to manage block space in a permissionless system—remains unresolved.
To be precise, the real debate is about the definition of ‘spam.’ In Bitcoin’s early years, spam was defined as transactions that paid no fees or negligible fees. The network’s relay policy was designed to ignore such transactions. But the Ordinals protocol uses standard transactions that pay fees. The purists argue that the data content (e.g., images) violates the spirit of the protocol. The pragmatists argue that the protocol is agnostic to data content. This is a philosophical divide, not a technical one. The BIP-110 myth is an attempt to settle a philosophical argument with a historical reference. It fails because the reference is false.
Let me now examine the engineering trade-offs in detail. The purist position would require a change to the default transaction relay policy or a soft fork to enforce data limits. Either approach introduces risks. Changing relay policy could fragment the network: nodes with different policies would see different sets of transactions, potentially leading to orphaned blocks. A soft fork would require near-universal adoption, which is difficult to achieve without a clear consensus. The pragmatic position—do nothing—also has risks. Continued growth of non-financial data could increase the blockchain’s size, making full node operation more expensive. But that risk is manageable with pruning and storage optimization. The real risk is that the debate itself erodes confidence in Bitcoin’s ability to govern itself. That is the ‘s unintended consequences’ of the entire spectacle: the network may survive, but the perception of its governance fails.
I recall during my audit of the 0x protocol v2 in 2017, I encountered a similar narrative distortion. A developer claimed a certain vulnerability was ‘known and fixed’ when in fact the fix had never been merged. The claim was used to justify a rushed deployment. I had to dig through the commit history to find the truth. The same principle applies here. The truth is that BIP-110 (the real one) is not about spam. The truth is that the Bitcoin community has not formally rejected any proposal to filter non-financial transactions. The debate is open. The ‘failure’ is a construction.
The contrarian angle is that the purists are actually the ones who misunderstand the protocol. Bitcoin’s security model is based on fees. The higher the fees, the more secure the network (because miners are incentivized to continue mining). By labeling high-fee non-financial transactions as spam, purists are arguing against a dynamic that strengthens the network. They are advocating for a form of censorship that could be extended to other transaction types. The slippery slope is real: if the community accepts that the protocol should filter certain data, who decides what is filtered? The purists have no answer. They rely on a vague notion of ‘intent’ that is unenforceable in a permissionless system. The BIP-110 myth is their attempt to claim a false victory.
The takeaway is a forward-looking judgment. The governance debate will intensify as Ordinals and similar protocols continue to use Bitcoin’s block space. The network will not collapse. The fee market will adjust. But the political cost of this debate is high. The ‘s unintended consequences’ of the BIP-110 myth may be a lasting division within the developer community, which could slow future upgrades like OP_CAT or covenants. The real vulnerability is not the block space—it is the governance space. The network can handle any data, but it cannot handle a fractured community that no longer trusts the BIP process. The question is not whether BIP-110 failed; it is whether the community can learn to separate fact from fiction before the next real proposal comes along.