Blockstream CEO Adam Back has once again taken aim at the controversial BIP-110 proposal after its attempted fork failed to win meaningful market or miner support. In a November 3 post on X (formerly Twitter), Back—referencing commentary from Bitcoin advocate Francis Pouliot—told BIP-110 backers bluntly: “Attempts to impose your views on bitcoin get market rejected.” He reiterated a familiar theme: efforts to change Bitcoin’s consensus rules face not just technical scrutiny but market and community resistance. Back added that the disagreement “isn’t necessarily about the payload,” arguing the core issue is attempts to override consensus, and later described the proposal as having “failed the first gate hard” because of serious technical problems. He also resurfaced a quip from July: “Time is a flat circle,” framing the episode as another round in a recurring debate over Bitcoin’s immutability. What BIP-110 proposed - Authored by Dathon Ohm and formally titled the “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork,” BIP-110 sought to temporarily (about one year) restrict the storage of arbitrary, non-financial data in Bitcoin transactions. - Key limits included cutting standard transaction output scripts to 34 bytes, allowing OP_RETURN outputs up to 83 bytes, restricting certain data fields to 256 bytes, and adding constraints affecting Taproot transactions. - Supporters argued inscriptions and other non-financial data impose long-term storage costs on nodes, and that limiting such activity would lower operating costs and preserve Bitcoin’s role as a payments network. Supporters and opponents - Prominent supporters included developer Luke Dashjr (Bitcoin Knots, OCEAN mining pool). Some backers later discussed more drastic measures—such as changing the minority network’s proof-of-work to BLAKE2b—after the activation attempt faltered. - Opponents—including Back and, earlier in the debate, Michael Saylor—argued that changing consensus to reject specific transaction types undermines Bitcoin’s neutrality and risks fracturing the network. The activation attempt and fork - BIP-110 required 55% miner signaling for voluntary activation. During the signaling window only 2.53% of blocks supported it—far short of the threshold. - On August 8, a small cohort of nodes enforcing BIP-110 rejected a block accepted by the main network, producing a minority branch that mined two blocks before falling behind the established chain. That branch failed to attract sufficient mining power to persist as a viable competitor. Current adoption snapshot - The proposal’s official status is Closed. - Public monitoring data from bitdis.org (Nov. 3) recorded only eight enforcing nodes among 18,870 observed nodes—roughly 0.04%—and zero BIP-110 signaling blocks among the 649 blocks mined in the current difficulty period. These figures are a snapshot of publicly observable nodes and don’t capture private deployments, but they underline the tiny footprint of BIP-110 enforcement in the wild. - Bitcoin Core remains the dominant client (about 90% of monitored nodes), with Bitcoin Knots representing roughly 10%. Running Bitcoin Knots does not automatically equate to backing BIP-110, as the software supports different configurations. Why this matters The BIP-110 episode highlights persistent tensions in Bitcoin governance: how to balance technical limits, node operating costs and the network’s neutrality and immutability. Back’s rebuke—framed as a market-based rejection—underscores how changes to consensus rules face multifaceted barriers: technical scrutiny, miner economics, node operator choices, and community norms. As the dust settles, BIP-110 has failed to form a lasting rival chain or win broad adoption. For now, the incident reinforces the status quo: meaningful protocol changes require broad technical, miner and community alignment—something BIP-110 could not secure. Read more AI-generated news on: https://app.chaingpt.org/news