Bitcoin’s Biggest Rule Change Faces Collapse: Michael Saylor Opposes, Miner Support Drops to Zero

BIP-110, the proposal to strip data hoarding from Bitcoin, is heading for collapse at its August test, with the mandatory signalling window opening at block 961,632 while miner backing sits at effectively zero, and critics led by Michael Saylor line up against it. If a determined minority enforces it anyway, the chain could split, and ordinary holders, not developers, would be the ones left sorting out which version of their coins counts.

The proposal, titled the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, would spend a year squeezing the space available for non-financial data, capping the OP_RETURN field at 83 bytes and limiting large script pushes, in a direct strike at the inscription boom that has filled blocks with images and tokens. Its author writes under the pseudonym Dathon Ohm, with veteran developer Luke Dashjr credited as a contributor, a detail that has itself become part of the fight.

The mechanics are what make August dangerous. BIP-110 needs only 55% of hash power to lock in, far beneath the 95% convention of past upgrades, and it uses user-activated rules: nodes running enforcing software, mostly Bitcoin Knots, would begin rejecting blocks that fail to signal once the window opens, with activation projected around 1 September. The proposal’s public signalling tracker has never shown support above 1% since December, and it hovers at effectively nothing now.

What Happens If a Minority Forces the Fork

A soft fork with minority backing does not change Bitcoin for everyone; it splits the enforcers onto their own chain. Existing coins are unaffected and would exist on both sides, as they did in 2017, leaving exchanges and custodians to decide which ledger customers see, while Nakamoto chief executive David Bailey has publicly asked which chain CME’s bitcoin futures would reference in a break.

The dispute is loud in crypto feeds, and losing its nuance as it travels; one promotional roundup compressed it to a single line, below.

That account is a marketing aggregator, and several of its neighbouring claims are unverified, so the substance here rests on the proposal’s own text, the public signalling tracker and the principals’ statements. Nothing changes for holders in August by default; the risk arrives only if the enforcing minority follows through.

The most prominent names are against it. Michael Saylor posted that the measure ‘turns a spam dispute into a consensus change’ and called that precedent the real danger, while Adam Back warned that activation on minority support would simply mint a minority altcoin. Mark Erhardt, one of the editors who maintains Bitcoin’s proposal repository, dismissed it as ‘a misguided and unusually careless softfork proposal.’

Believers, Workarounds, and a 2014 Grudge

The other side is just as absolute. Dashjr wrote that ‘If BIP110 fails, Bitcoin fails with it,’ casting the data flood as an existential rot, and supporters argue a chain built for money should not be a storage locker. The row has turned personal, with Bailey reviving a 2014 episode in which Dashjr blacklisted rival software, arguing it shows how the proposal’s camp treats dissent.

Even victory might not deliver the purge. Ordinals developers have already published workarounds that split data into fragments small enough to slip under the new caps, an approach validated by the protocol’s own creator, Casey Rodarmor. For a network valued near $1.3 trillion (£970B), the real contest is less about bytes than about who gets to decide the rules.

For anyone holding bitcoin, the checklist is short. Watch the window dates, expect notices from exchanges only if enforcement actually materialises, and treat any urgent offer tied to the fork with suspicion, because in every previous split, the noise arrived long before the protocol did. The chain has survived louder arguments than this one. Whether it survives them without another sibling is what August will show.

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