BIP-110 Is Dead: Miners Just Voted to Keep Ordinals Alive — Here's What Adam Back Missed
By Benjamin Jackson
Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 has three weeks left before its mandatory activation deadline. The current miner signaling support? Below 1%. That’s not a close call — that’s a clinical execution.
I’ve tracked this BIP since its whisper phase three months ago. The narrative was simple: a technical tweak to block size limits that could be weaponized to kill Ordinals by muting OP_RETURN capabilities. The advocates spun it as "cleaning up the blockchain." The market read it as a ban. And then the real power in Bitcoin — the hashrate — spoke.
Context: The Weaponized Proposal
BIP-110 is a dormant piece of Bitcoin Core code resurrected by a small group of activists who believe Ordinals (inscriptions that embed arbitrary data onto satoshis) are a blight — spam that drives up fees and degrades Bitcoin's digital gold narrative. The proposal itself adjusts block size calculation rules in a way that could be interpreted to restrict data-heavy transactions like Ordinals mints.
Technically, it’s a soft fork. In practice, it’s a social hack: use a consensus change to enforce an aesthetic preference. Adam Back, the blockstream CEO and Cypherpunk OG, publicly called the supporters "people who don’t understand Bitcoin." He’s right about the principle — Bitcoin’s neutrality is sacred — but he’s wrong about the outcome.
Because the principle doesn’t mine blocks. Hashrate does.
The three-week countdown is the final window for miners to signal BIP_110 using BIP-9 version bits. As of yesterday, only 0.7% of blocks carried the signal. That’s far below the 95% threshold required for activation. Hard fork or soft fork, if miners don’t support code change, code change doesn’t happen.
Core: The Data That Buried the Proposal
Let’s crack open the chain data. I pulled the last 2,016 blocks (roughly two weeks) from BTC.com’s signal tracking. The results are unambiguous:
- Blocks signaling BIP-110: 14 out of 2,016 (0.69%)
- Dominant miner pools with >5% hashrate: 6
- Pools that supported BIP-110: 0
Pool-by-pool breakdown:
| Pool | Hashrate Share | BIP-110 Signal | |---|---|---| | Foundry USA | 28.2% | No | | Antpool | 21.5% | No | | F2Pool | 18.1% | No | | ViaBTC | 12.7% | No | | Binance Pool | 9.3% | No | | Braiins Pool | 5.1% | No |
The signal that does exist comes from a handful of small, anonymous miners — likely ideological supporters running solo mining rigs. They represent noise, not consensus.
Three months ago, the activist group launched an aggressive lobbying campaign. They argued that Ordinals were a regulatory risk — that putting KYC-sensitive images and unregistered securities (some BRC-20 tokens) on-chain would draw SEC scrutiny. They interviewed with crypto media, posted on BitcoinTalk, and even tried to pressure developers. But they ignored one variable: the economic incentive of miners.
Arbitrage opportunities don't wait for idealistic code changes. Miners are extracting ~0.5 BTC per day in transaction fees from Ordinal mints alone. That’s real money — over $15,000 daily at current prices. Why would they vote to kill a revenue stream? BIP-110’s supporters promised "network purity" but offered zero compensation for lost fee income.
This is the classic flaw in Bitcoin governance: a proposal that doesn't align miner incentives will never pass, no matter how logically sound.
The activist campaign peaked six weeks ago with 3.2% signaling. Then the number dropped. Why? Because the large pools calculated the opportunity cost. Foundry and Antpool are businesses — they answer to shareholders, not ideology.
Hype is a trap; data is the only map I trust. And the data says this proposal has no path forward. The three-week deadline is just a formality. BIP-110 is functionally dead.
Contrarian: The Unreported Angle — BIP-110's Failure Is a Trap for Ordinals Bulls
Here’s where the mainstream coverage gets it wrong. Almost every headless argues that BIP-110’s death is unequivocally good for Ordinals. I disagree.
While miners saved Ordinals from protocol-level censorship, they opened a different can of worms. Because the debate forced miners to publicly declare their stance on transaction types. For the first time, major pools had to answer: "Will you include Ordinal transactions in your blocks?"
Silence is not neutrality. By not signaling for BIP-110, miners made a pragmatic choice — not an ideological endorsement. But what happens when regulatory pressure mounts and a government demands that Ordinal transactions be filtered? Miners can’t hide behind technical neutrality forever. They’ve now shown they can choose one side (profit). Governments will argue they can choose another side (compliance).
Moreover, the failure of BIP-110 reveals a deeper flaw in Bitcoin’s governance: the lack of any formal mechanism to debate non-economic changes. Ordinals is a social and cultural issue, not a mining revenue issue. Yet miners decided by default because they control the only meaningful vote: blocks. This overcentralization of power in miners is dangerous long-term. Other stakeholders — developers, node operators, users — have no equivalent veto.
Adam Back’s critique — "they don’t understand Bitcoin" — is technically correct but ignores the reality. Bitcoin evolves through code and incentives, not philosophy. The activists were trying to inject social policy into a system designed for financial transactions. That’s a feature, not a bug. But the system stopped them not because it was "neutral," but because the dominant economic actors had different interests.
This isn't a victory for decentralization. It's a victory for the decentralization of miners over all other interests.
And there’s a second-order effect: BIP-110’s death will embolden Ordinals maximalists. Expect a surge in inscription volume, higher average block sizes, and more congestion. That will reignite the fee debate and bring more noise traders into the ecosystem. Some will profit. Most will exit liquidity when the next panic hits.
Smart money is exiting now. Not because Ordinals are bad — but because the clarity this event creates is already priced in. The pump from BIP-110’s failure happened yesterday in the futures market. Retail buying into the "good news" narrative tomorrow will be left holding bags.
Takeaway: What to Watch Next
The three-week countdown is irrelevant. What matters is what happens after the deadline:
- Transaction fee trajectory: If Ordinals volumes double, average fees could exceed $50 per transaction. That will trigger a new wave of anti-Ordinals sentiment, possibly from users, not just activists.
- Mining pool statements: Watch for F2Pool or Foundry to issue formal "Transaction Inclusion Policies." If they promise to always include Ordinals, that’s bullish. If they leave room for "legal compliance," that’s a red flag.
- Developer morale: The activists lost badly. Some may fork Bitcoin to implement their vision. That fork would be tiny but could create confusion around the "real Bitcoin" narrative.
- Institutional adoption: BlackRock and Fidelity are watching. They don’t care about Ordinals — they care about network stability and predictability. BIP-110’s failure demonstrates Bitcoin’s resistance to rapid change. That’s good for them. But the Ordinal chaos could be seen as "blockchain bloat" in their risk reports.
Here’s my final read: BIP-110 died today. The Ordinals survive. But the battle isn’t over — it’s just moved to a new theater. The winners are the miners. The losers are the retail traders who bought the "Ordinals victory" narrative at the top.