MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor has officially entered the escalating debate over Bitcoin’s BIP-110 protocol upgrade. He issued a sprawling public rejection of the proposed soft fork. In a Sunday afternoon post on X that quickly accumulated over 879,000 views, Saylor published “110 reasons” opposing the network change. He argued that while he supports protecting Bitcoin’s monetary utility, restricting core protocol rules is the wrong approach.
The intervention arrives at a highly sensitive juncture for the world’s largest cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin network is currently moving through its final 2,016-block ordinary window for voluntary miner signaling. To lock in the BIP-110 upgrade early, 55% of mined blocks must signal support using bit 4. As of Monday, miner support sits near 1%, yielding only two to four signaling blocks per day.
What We Know
- BIP-110 was authored by pseudonymous developer Dathon Ohm to cap output sizes and clear blockchain congestion.
- The proposal specifically targets arbitrary data protocols like Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens, which severely slowed the network in 2023.
- Ordinals inscriptions have already cooled organically, dropping from 400,000 per day last August to fewer than 10,000 daily over the past month.
With voluntary signaling effectively dead on arrival, the network is staring down a mandatory transition. If the 55% threshold is not met during this final window, the protocol will transition into a forced signaling phase scheduled for August 2026. At that exact point, enforcing nodes will begin outright orphaning any miner blocks that fail to carry the BIP-110 signal. That mechanism heavily elevates the risk of a permanent chain split.
Saylor is not the only high-profile industry veteran pushing back against the protocol change. Blockstream CEO Adam Back has publicly criticized BIP-110, labeling the proposal a “literal downgrade” that threatens to disrupt existing legitimate applications built on the network.
Echoes of the 2017 Blocksize Wars
The enforcement mechanism driving BIP-110 relies on a User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) flag day. This is the exact same high-risk maneuver utilized during the historic SegWit blocksize wars in 2017 to force miner compliance.
The difference today is the urgency of the underlying network stress. When Dathon Ohm initially drafted BIP-110, network congestion from BRC-20 tokens was actively crippling transaction throughput. Now, with daily inscriptions falling below 10,000 organically, proponents are finding it increasingly difficult to justify a hardline protocol restriction to solve a problem that appears to be resolving itself. Saylor’s highly public opposition provides immediate political cover for miners who have quietly refused to signal support.