Bitcoin's Soul Battle: The First Block Supporting BIP-110 Is Born, On-Chain Data Limit Disputes Intensify

Ocean Mining Pool mines the first block supporting BIP-110, which proposes filtering non-financial data. The community is deeply divided over this approach, with opponents worried about governance erosion and chain splits.
(Background: Do you agree that BIP-110 is a prerequisite for Bitcoin reaching $1 million?)
(Additional context: Bitcoin Core v30 updates to “allow OP_RETURN”; opponents burn: decentralization is dead)

Table of Contents

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• Who is fighting this battle?
• 55% danger threshold
• The real issue isn’t spam

Earlier, Bitcoin mining pool Ocean mined the first block signaling support for BIP-110, marking the start of an ideological war that has been brewing for years, escalating from forum debates to on-chain confrontations.

The core proposal of BIP-110 is simple: through a temporary soft fork, limit the storage of “non-monetary data” on the Bitcoin blockchain for about a year. In other words, BIP-110 aims to directly classify behaviors like storing images, videos, and NFT inscriptions in block space as violations at the consensus level.

Who is fighting this battle?

Supporters are led by Luke Dashjr, maintainer of Bitcoin Knots and CTO of Ocean Pool. Since the Ordinals surge in 2023, Dashjr has called on-chain inscriptions “spam,” arguing they erode Bitcoin’s core function as monetary infrastructure and increase the burden on full node operators. BIP-110 (initially numbered BIP-444) is an institutionalized attempt to formalize this stance.

Opponents include veteran developers, major mining pools, and leading security infrastructure providers.

Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream, warned that scrutinizing transaction types at the consensus layer would damage Bitcoin’s credibility and set a precedent for “discriminatory treatment.” Co-founder of F2Pool, Wang Chun, used a precise analogy: BIP-110 is like claiming to protect children while shoving a bunch of nonsense down everyone’s throat. Jameson Lopp, co-founder of Casa, published a lengthy critique, calling BIP-110 “reckless, irrational, and doomed to fail.”

The 55% danger threshold

The activation mechanism of BIP-110 itself is controversial. It only requires 55% hash support. By comparison, the 2017 SegWit upgrade required 95% miner signaling support.

What does 55% mean? It implies nearly half of the hash power might oppose the rule change but still be forced to accept it. In Bitcoin’s governance philosophy, this could turn into majority tyranny.

More troubling is the mandatory activation at block height 961,632 (around September 2026), regardless of support at that time. Lopp’s analysis points out that this design risks freezing existing UTXOs: if some unspent transaction outputs depend on scripts now deemed “invalid,” those funds could become permanently locked.

What is the current support level? According to public data, support among nodes for BIP-110 is less than 5% (mainly from Bitcoin Knots users). However, the number of Bitcoin Knots nodes has increased about tenfold since early 2025, now holding 22.49% of the market share, while Bitcoin Core nodes have decreased to 77.39%.

Although node count and hash power are different metrics, this trend warrants close observation.

The real issue isn’t spam

Beyond technical details, the BIP-110 debate reflects a fundamental unresolved divide within the Bitcoin community: Is Bitcoin’s block space “a scarce monetary infrastructure” or “a neutral data layer”?

The former argues that Bitcoin’s value derives from its monetary function, and any deviation from this purpose wastes scarce resources, which should be restricted at the protocol level. The latter believes Bitcoin’s value comes from its neutrality and resistance to censorship; once the network begins defining “legitimate uses” at the consensus level, it opens a door that can never be closed.

Adam Back’s concern points here: today, restrictions on inscriptions under the guise of protecting the network could tomorrow be used to limit privacy transactions, coin mixing, or flows of funds to certain addresses. Once censorship is established as a precedent, its scope is no longer dictated by technology but by politics.

From a market structure perspective, the timing of this debate is also intriguing. The Ordinals and inscription ecosystem has cooled since the frenzy of 2023, on-chain data volume has decreased naturally, and fee pressure is no longer at the levels seen at the end of 2023. In other words, the “problem” BIP-110 aims to address is already being solved by the market itself.