Bitcoiners Michael Saylor, Adam Back Oppose BIP-110

Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor and Blockstream CEO Adam Back have doubled down on their opposition to BIP-110, a proposed temporary fork to limit non-monetary transactions on the Bitcoin network.

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal-110 was introduced in December 2025 to stop nonfungible token-like Ordinals inscriptions and other arbitrary data from “spamming” the network and to preserve Bitcoin’s main use as a peer-to-peer cash system.

While critical of Ordinals activity, Saylor and Back fear a fork could do more harm than good to the network’s credibility. “There are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam,” Saylor said in a post to X on Saturday, adding that BIP-110 could invalidate ordinary transactions on the network.

Source: Michael Saylor

BIP-110 is one of the more notable protocol-level disputes in the Bitcoin development community since the Blocksize Wars between 2015 and 2017, when ecosystem participants debated whether it was worth risking a chain split to raise the block size limit for scalability. 

BIP-110 was introduced by pseudonymous Bitcoin developer “Dathon Ohm” with the support of Ocean protocol founder Luke Dashjr. 

BIP-110 is a long shot from activating

BIP-110 won’t be activated unless 55% of Bitcoin nodes validating blocks are in support of the proposal across a Bitcoin block “period.”

In the last period, period number 475 between block 955,584 and 957,599, only 1% of blocks were BIP-110-supportive.

The dispute comes at a time when Ordinals activity is at near all-time lows, with fewer than 10,000 Ordinals inscribed into the Bitcoin blockchain on a daily basis over the last month, down massively from the more than 400,000 seen during its peak in August 2023.

Change in daily Ordinals inscriptions since December 2022. Source: Dune Analytics

Meanwhile, Back offered a deeper critique of BIP-110, describing it as a “quest to police other people.” 

Related: Bitcoin doesn’t need Ethereum-style yield, says Strategy’s Michael Saylor 

He said Bitcoin’s decentralization should mean “you can’t impose your views on others,” calling it incompatible with Bitcoin’s cypherpunk ethos of permissionless, censorship-resistant money.

Dashjr and other BIP-110 proponents have called Ordinals-driven bloat a “serious threat” to the network, prompting the need for an imminent fix.

They have also argued BIP-110 wouldn’t cause a chain split, as many fear, while adding that the BIP-110 fork imposes a temporary one-year limit and thus wouldn’t invalidate fee-paying transactions over the long term.

Features: From Bitcoin critics to blockchain believers: The 5 biggest crypto backflips