The Strategy chairman argued the soft fork is a “bad idea,” warning it would cause more harm than the problem it aims to solve.
Michael Saylor has escalated his opposition to a contentious Bitcoin proposal, publishing a sweeping 110-point essay over the weekend arguing that BIP-110—a soft fork meant to curb non-financial data on the network—would cause more harm than the problem it targets.
Titled “110 Reasons BIP 110 Is a Bad Idea,” the Strategy executive chairman billed the text as a “case for neutral rules, hard consensus, open markets, and permissionless innovation.” Saylor said he shares the proposal’s underlying objectives, such as keeping validation accessible, protecting node operators from unwanted costs, preserving affordable payments, and keeping Bitcoin focused on sound money, but rejects the remedy on offer.
What BIP-110 actually changes
BIP-110, formally the “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork,” reached “Complete” status in the BIPs repository on June 25, 2026—a designation that, per BIP 3, means the authors consider their work finished and recommend adoption, not that the network has actually reached consensus on it.
For roughly a year, the proposal would bolt seven new consensus restrictions onto Bitcoin: capping new scriptPubKeys at 34 bytes (with an 83-byte carve-out for OP_RETURN); limiting most pushed payloads and script-argument witness items to 256 bytes; barring the spend of undefined witness and Tapleaf versions; prohibiting the Taproot annex; capping Taproot control blocks at 257 bytes; rejecting Tapscripts that contain OP_SUCCESSx opcodes; and rejecting executed OP_IF or OP_NOTIF in Tapscript.
The design targets the inscriptions and Ordinals activity that has crowded block space and pushed up fees since 2023. It grandfathers UTXOs created before activation, and it swaps the standard BIP-9 activation mechanism for a modified version: a 55% miner-signaling threshold instead of the customary 95%, no conventional timeout or FAILED state, a mandatory-signaling window, and a guaranteed lock-in on the enforcing chain by a specified block height. Signaling has so far run below 1%, according to the proposal’s own monitoring dashboard—well short of the 55% bar it needs to clear.
Supporters, including developer Luke Dashjr and the Bitcoin Knots camp, frame BIP-110 as a defense against spam. Critics counter that it would invalidate currently valid, fee-paying transactions and risks splitting the network.
The precedent problem
Saylor’s essay builds on an earlier argument that the real hazard isn’t the data itself but the template BIP-110 sets. His core objection: Bitcoin “cannot read intent.” The network has no way of knowing whether a given set of bytes encodes an image, a cryptographic proof, a contract, metadata, or an application nobody has built yet — so restricting the technical forms used to carry data inevitably catches legitimate uses in the same net.
“‘Spam’ is not a consensus primitive,” he wrote, arguing that disapproval of a use case “is not invalidity.” Changing consensus rules to police one contested use case, in his framing, creates a mechanism that other factions can invoke against other targets — he named privacy tooling, novel custody constructions, stablecoin settlement, and token systems as plausible future candidates for “similar arguments.” That risk, he stressed, “is not a prediction” but “a governance risk”: the restrictions themselves sunset after about a year, “but the precedent does not.”
Many Bitcoiners I respect support BIP 110. I understand and share their desire to protect Bitcoin, but believe the proposed cure is more dangerous than the condition. Here are 110 reasons why Bitcoin needs guardians of neutrality. https://t.co/hOAqfAgC58
— Michael Saylor (@saylor) July 19, 2026
Saylor’s shorthand for the proposal is a “Bitcoin Iatrogenic Proposal”—borrowing the medical term for harm caused by the treatment itself.
He also took aim at the activation mechanics. Lowering the miner-signaling bar to 55% from BIP-9’s traditional 95%, while eliminating the usual option for a proposal to quietly time out, strikes him as a mismatch between the strength of the intervention and the strength of the consensus behind it. Mismatched enforcement across the network, he warned, “can divide the network.”
Sides forming
Saylor frames the dispute as a referendum on Bitcoin’s character rather than a narrow technical debate.
“Bitcoin’s strength is not that everyone agrees on every use,” he wrote, arguing that its resilience instead comes from the fact that “disagreement is contained by neutral rules and hard consensus.”
His conclusion: “Bitcoin does not need guardians of purity. It needs guardians of neutrality.”
That position puts him alongside Blockstream CEO Adam Back, Casa’s Jameson Lopp, and Bitcoin advocate Samson Mow, who have separately raised objections to the proposal—set against Dashjr and the Knots developer camp on the other side of the split.
The stakes have a near-term deadline attached: BIP-110’s mandatory signaling window opens in August, with activation targeted around September 1, giving both camps roughly six weeks to either build support or shore up opposition before the mechanism forces the issue.
Saylor’s essay does address the strongest technical case for BIP-110 head-on rather than dismissing it: large scriptPubKeys genuinely can inflate the UTXO set and raise validation costs for full nodes. His objection is less to that underlying concern than to the response: bundling a narrowly justifiable fix for state growth together with six other restrictions that constrain reserved upgrade space (the Taproot annex, undefined witness versions, OP_SUCCESSx opcodes) that developers had deliberately preserved for future soft forks.
He argues a narrower, better-evidenced proposal aimed specifically at the state-growth problem would carry far less collateral risk than the current bundl, and that the proof for a consensus change of this scope hasn’t been met.
Further reading: BIP-110 specification on GitHub; BIP-9 activation mechanism; Decrypt’s explainer on the BIP-110 divide; BIP-110 signaling monitor.