A fierce ideological battle within the Bitcoin community has erupted around BIP-110, a controversial soft fork proposal aimed at curbing the storage of arbitrary data like Ordinals inscriptions on the blockchain. With less than 10,000 blocks until the forced activation window in early August 2026, the conflict has escalated from a technical debate into a high-stakes struggle over Bitcoin’s fundamental purpose—digital money versus a permissionless data layer.
The latest data reveals that miner backing remains infinitesimal. According to BGeometrics' daily API, since May 1, 2026, only 38 out of 9,066 blocks have signaled support for BIP-110, a mere 0.42%. In the most recent seven-day window (June 26–July 2), just 8 of 1,000 blocks (0.8%) carried the signal. Farside Investors has begun posting automated alerts on X each time a signaling block appears, highlighting a handful of sporadic signals—such as July 1's 0.70% and July 2's 1.53%—that fall catastrophically short of the miner-driven lock-in threshold of 1,109 signaling blocks (55%) within a difficulty period.
Despite this apathy, BIP-110’s design includes a mandatory-signaling fallback via a user-activated soft fork (UASF). From blocks 961,632 to 963,647, any block that does not signal bit 4 will be rejected by enforcing nodes. Lock-in is expected by block 963,648, with activation at height 965,664. This mechanism forces a conclusion even if miners never organically support it, raising the specter of a chain split. Blockstream CEO Adam Back has warned of a real risk of a fork that could fragment the network into two incompatible versions. MicroStrategy Chairman Michael Saylor called the internal measure “an unnecessary risk to the global stability of the system.”
Proponents argue that BIP-110 is essential to preserve Bitcoin’s scarcity and resistance to spam. Luke Dashjr, the maintainer of Bitcoin Knots and a contributor to the proposal, declared unequivocally: “If BIP110 fails, Bitcoin fails with it. I am not interested in any CBDC, much less an unregulated CBDC pretending to be decentralised. There’s already plenty of scamcoins filling that role anyway.” He insists that without the 256-byte-per-fragment restriction, Bitcoin risks becoming indistinguishable from central bank digital currencies.
Ordinals developers, however, have already built workarounds. On July 2, programmer lifofifoX published an update that splits large files into multiple fragments small enough to evade the proposed limit. Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Ordinals, validated the change on GitHub. The financial dimension intensifies the dispute: the Runes protocol drove a 32% spike in miner transaction fees in October 2024, injecting new revenue streams. Critics of BIP-110 claim this income boosts network security, while supporters counter that node operators must store gigabytes of non-payment data without compensation.
The coming weeks will be pivotal. Exchanges, wallets, pools, and node operators must now decide whether to prepare for a contentious activation or bet that support will remain too feeble to tip the network. Public alert feeds turn each tiny signal into an operational risk metric, and as the August window nears, even the smallest shift by a major mining pool like Foundry USA or Antpool could rewrite the calculus—and the destiny of the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
