Why Bitcoin's BIP-110 refuses to die despite near-zero miner support

Bitcoin is approaching a rare test this weekend, with a small group of nodes is preparing to reject blocks produced by almost all of the network’s miners.

The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-110, a controversial proposal to temporarily restrict how much non-payment data can be stored on the Bitcoin blockchain, approaches its long-planned mandatory signalling period, expected to be sometime on Aug. 9. The actual activation, if it takes place, would follow at block 965,664, estimated around four weeks later.

Its ordinary 55% approval threshold is already out of reach.

Nodes are computers running Bitcoin software that independently check transactions and blocks against the network’s rules, rejecting anything they consider invalid. Miners create new blocks, while nodes decide whether to accept them.

On paper, BIP-110 looks finished, with public signaling from mining pools negligible at under 3% and only two days to go until the Bitcoin network reaches the height at which

If BIP-110 was a referendum, “landslide” wouldn’t begin to describe the scale of its defeat.

Its proponents argue that Bitcoin’s software means anyone is free to adopt a different version of the code and enforce whatever rules they believe define the network.

Dathon Ohm, the proposal’s pseudonymous author, declared, “Bitcoiners are about to show the world, once again, what happens when the plebs stand up against large, corrupt institutions who are telling us Bitcoin isn’t money and our nodes belong to them,” in a thread on X on Thursday.

Rhetoric aside, the thread gave instructions to miners planning on enforcing the BIP-110 rulebook, advising them to upgrade to Bitcoin Knots (the primary software carrying and enforcing BIP-110), warning that Bitcoin Core (the network’s principal software that represents the current implementation of Bitcoin’s rules) should not be run as it would become “insecure.”

BIP-110 is designed to temporarily tighten Bitcoin’s consensus rules to make inscription techniques used by Ordinals and Runes impractical. Its supports argue that use of the network for non-financial data consume block spacer, make it more expensive to run and undermine Bitcoin’s purpose of digital money.

Critics have pointed to the lack of miner support as evidence that the proposal is effectively dead. Its supporters reject that premise.

BIP-110’s proponents argue that miners do not govern Bitcoin – they merely produce the blocks. Nodes decide whether those blocks comply with rules. User-activates soft forks (UASFs) are designed around that principle, allowing node operators to begin enforcing new rules from a predetermined block height regardless of miner support.