Saylor slams BIP-110 as threat to bitcoin’s core values

Michael Saylor articulates a profound philosophical stance by framing Bitcoin's consensus rules as a constitutional safeguard that protects economic rights and network neutrality, warning that BIP-110 poses a direct threat to these foundational principles. He contends that altering these rules for the convenience of any faction fundamentally rewrites Bitcoin’s constitution, effectively confiscating the economic freedoms of all participants, present and future. This perspective situates BIP-110 not merely as a technical proposal but as a constitutional offense that risks undermining the neutrality essential to Bitcoin's role as a decentralized economic system.

Extending his critique beyond BIP-110, Saylor identifies a pattern among various protocol changes—including covenants and larger-block proposals—that collectively represent different instruments of the same constitutional violation. He argues these changes impose the agenda, costs, and risks of specific factions onto the entire network, thereby threatening Bitcoin’s economic rights and network neutrality. Emphasizing prudence, Saylor insists that protocol modifications must be rare, conservative, and necessity-driven to uphold Bitcoin’s constitution and safeguard the economic freedoms of current and future users.

Michael Saylor's exhaustive 110-point technical critique of BIP-110 underscores a fundamental threat to Bitcoin's consensus integrity by proposing new restrictions on transaction scripts and witness data that would invalidate currently valid, fee-paying transactions. He labels BIP-110 a 'Bitcoin Iatrogenic Proposal,' warning that such consensus rewrites impose factional agendas and economic costs on all participants, effectively attacking the 'economic rights' encoded in Bitcoin's protocol constitution. This framing situates BIP-110 alongside other controversial changes like covenants and larger-block proposals, all of which risk corrupting Bitcoin's neutral consensus rules and long-term security.

Saylor highlights that BIP-110’s data usage limits and restrictions on non-financial data risk undermining Bitcoin’s foundational network neutrality by favoring certain transaction types and embedding governance risks that could be exploited to censor future legitimate innovations such as privacy tools or stablecoin settlements. He emphasizes Bitcoin’s inability to interpret the intent behind data bytes, cautioning that subjective labels like 'garbage' cannot serve as consensus primitives without threatening the protocol’s openness to innovation and neutral rule enforcement.

The proposal’s activation mechanics raise additional concerns, as BIP-110 lowers the miner-signaling threshold from the traditional 95% to 55% and removes the option for quiet expiration, despite miner support languishing below 3% at the mandatory signaling window's start. Saylor warns this mismatch between low consensus and forced activation risks network division and enforcement fragmentation, undermining Bitcoin’s hard consensus model that relies on broad, clear agreement to maintain protocol stability and neutrality.

Beyond technical and consensus risks, Saylor critiques BIP-110 for lacking rigorous quantification of its purported benefits, such as reductions in node resource burdens or improvements in decentralization. He warns that if the proposal inadvertently lowers overall transaction fees, it could diminish miner revenue and threaten Bitcoin’s long-term security model, which increasingly depends on fee incentives as block rewards decline. This absence of clear economic and technical modeling further undermines the proposal’s justification within the Bitcoin community.

As the BIP-110 fork deadline loomed in mid-2026, Adam Back emerged as a vocal critic of its supporters, sharply accusing them of a fundamental misunderstanding of Bitcoin's consensus process. He argued that proponents were conflating genuine consensus—a decentralized agreement among network participants—with unilateral ultimatums, stating bluntly, 'They don't know Bitcoin.' This critique underscored a deeper community division, where technical nuances and philosophical interpretations of network governance were at odds, heightening tensions as the proposed fork threatened to disrupt Bitcoin’s established norms.