Evidence suggests a quiet but decisive funeral has been held for BIP-110, the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal that threatened to disable Ordinals by modifying block size constraints. Over the past three weeks, miner signaling dropped below 1% — a statistical zero in consensus terms. The proposal is dead before its deadline. Yet the narrative around this failure tells us more about Bitcoin's power structure than any successful fork ever could.
Let me be clear: I have watched projects die from code changes that lacked economic backing. But BIP-110’s collapse is different — it is a mirror held up to the tension between protocol purity and financial incentive. As a forensic auditor who traced FTX’s fugitive wallets across five chains, I know that chain-level game theory is harder to hack than any smart contract. Here, the miners decided that the fee revenue from Ordinals inscriptions was worth more than the ideological purity of a “clean” Bitcoin blockchain.
Context: The Proposal That Wasn't
BIP-110 was framed as a technical adjustment — modifying the block size limit to improve scalability. But back-channel discussions revealed its true purpose: to alter OP_RETURN rules in a way that would silently kill Ordinals’ ability to store arbitrary data. The move was a surgical strike by anti-Ordinals purists who view inscriptions as spam, a drain on block space that threatens Bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative.
Adam Back — cypherpunk OG, Hashcash inventor — publicly labeled the proposal’s supporters “people who don’t understand Bitcoin.” That single sentence encapsulated the schism: one camp sees Bitcoin as an immutable settlement layer that must remain neutral to all data; the other sees it as a platform that must be protected from non-financial use, even if that requires protocol changes.
Core: The Numbers Don't Lie — And Miners Vote With Hashrate
Here is the cold, mathematical reality. BIP-110 required 95% miner activation via BIP-9 signaling. Three weeks from deadline, signaling sat near 1% — effectively a vote of no confidence from the network’s only real governors.
I have sat through enough token audits to know that incentive misalignment kills more projects than code bugs. In this case, the incentive is stark: Ordinals have generated over $200 million in transaction fees for miners since inception. Killing that revenue stream with a code change would be financial self-mutilation. The 1% support likely came from small, ideologically driven pools. The rest made a rational choice: preserve the fees.
But the deeper insight is about Bitcoin's governance model. It is not a democracy of holders or a meritocracy of developers. It is a plutocracy of hashpower. The miners’ veto is absolute. This is the same force that prevented SegWit from activating until a user-activated soft fork (UASF) threatened the economic majority. And it is the same force that will resist any future attempt to censor applications at the protocol layer.
From my experience auditing DeFi protocols with “community governance,” I can tell you: most DAOs are oligarchies masked by token voting. Bitcoin’s system is at least honest about its power concentration. Two big mining pools — Antpool and F2Pool — could have swung the vote. They chose not to. That silence is louder than any manifesto.
Contrarian: What the Bulls Get Right (And Wrong)
The contrarian angle here is uncomfortable for Ordinals maximalists: BIP-110’s failure does not guarantee Ordinals’ survival. The real threat is not a protocol-level ban but a behavioral one. Miners could (and some already do) censor transactions at the mempool level by refusing to include inscriptions in their blocks. This creates a soft ban — no code change, but the same effect. The network remains “neutral” in theory but becomes hostile in practice.
Moreover, the regulatory overhang remains. If the SEC classifies Ordinals as unregistered securities, miners under US jurisdiction may face legal pressure to filter them. BIP-110’s death does not protect against that. It only closes one route of attack.
Another blind spot: the assumption that Bitcoin’s conservatism is always a feature. It is also a bug. By rejecting changes like BIP-110, the network misses opportunities to evolve. Ordinals may be a fad, but the underlying ability to attach data to Bitcoin could enable real-world applications like timestamping or supply chain tracking. By refusing to even debate the mechanism, the community ensures Bitcoin remains stagnant in application-layer innovation — fine for store of value, but limiting for broader utility.
Takeaway: The Balance Sheet Finality
Trust is a variable; proof is a constant. The proof here is clear: Bitcoin’s miners have drawn a line in the sand. They will not sacrifice fee revenue for ideological purity. BIP-110 is a casualty of that decision. But the war over Bitcoin’s identity — neutral settlement layer vs. pristine store of value — is far from over. The next BIP will come, and the miners will vote again. Will they choose long-term stability over short-term gain when the fees dry up? That is the only question that matters.
I will continue to watch the mempool and the mining pool statements. Because in this system, the only true audit is the next block.