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On September 2, 2021, I wrote that politics was eating Bitcoin, and put the mechanism in one sentence: “Without proof of work applied to data, politics wins the day.” By July 2024, I had sharpened the charge: BTC “is governed by UASF-style sybil votes,” and for that reason alone, it is not hard money. The small block faithful called all of that FUD, and then they went right on holding elections.
This August 2026, they are holding another one.
The ballot measure is BIP110, the “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork,” and it arrives with a campaign season, two parties, disputed polling, and a live results tracker at bip110.org. The BIP process was supposed to be an engineering pipeline. It has revealed itself as what a formal mechanism for change always becomes: a legislature. And money with a legislature is not sound money; it is fiat with extra steps, because whatever can be lobbied will be lobbied, forever.
The details are almost too perfect: BIP110 was submitted on October 24, 2025, by a pseudonymous developer called Dathon Ohm, who credits Bitcoin Knots maintainer Luke Dashjr with the first draft, and whom Bitcoin Core veteran Greg Maxwell has publicly accused of being a false identity for Ocean, the mining pool Dashjr co-founded (Ohm denies it).
Seventeen years after one pseudonym gave the world a protocol, another pseudonym is running a ballot initiative to decide what the first one meant.
The proposal strangles inscriptions at the consensus layer: new output scripts are capped at 34 bytes, data pushes, and witness items are capped at 256 bytes, and the opcode tricks that make “ordinals” possible are banned from tapscript. For the uninitiated, ordinal inscriptions are data blobs (images, tokens, entire JPEG collections) wedged into the witness space of BTC transactions, and they follow the network’s rules as written, so the rules must be changed. Temporarily! The whole regime sunsets after 52,416 blocks, about one year, which prompted Casa co-founder Jameson Lopp to observe that “there is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.”
The activation math is where the mask slips. A standard soft fork deployment requires 95% of hashpower to signal support before new rules are locked in. BIP110 lowered its own quorum to 55%, and if miners still refuse, a mandatory signaling window opens around block 961,632, roughly August 7, after which enforcing nodes reject every block that declines to vote correctly. When you cannot win the election, you do not change your platform.
You change the franchise.
Meet the two parties
The filter party says BTC is money and only money, and usually that money is meant to be held, not spent… Dashjr has been demanding enforcement since 2023, when he told CoinDesk that “action should have been taken months ago” because “spam filtration has been a standard part of Bitcoin Core since day 1.” His Bitcoin Knots software ships the filters, his Ocean pool mines block templates that exclude inscriptions, and the “Run Knots” campaign has pushed Knots to roughly a fifth of BTC’s reachable nodes, each one waving its user agent string like a yard sign. Asked last week if the whole thing should be called off, Dashjr answered it is “too late to cancel BIP110.”
The valid-is-valid party answers that consensus rules define what BTC is, and everything past them is preference. Casey Rodarmor, the man who created ordinals, warns that “attempting to censor inscriptions is exactly identical to attempting censoring other kinds of transactions,” and on July 2, he approved a workaround that splits inscriptions into rule-compliant pieces built to sail straight through BIP110. Even Blockstream’s Adam Back, no friend of JPEGs, calls the proposal “a lynch mob attempt to push changes there is not consensus for.”
For some tragic fun, let’s count the votes.
Miner signaling for BIP110 stood at 0.42% of blocks mined since May, per the BGeometrics tracker, with the trailing week near 0.8%. Node counts tell a different story, which is itself the story: when 10,361 nodes suddenly appeared signaling BIP110 support in March, Lopp published the chart with the caption “Spot the Sybil Attack.” A protocol referendum, complete with ballot stuffing accusations!
Meanwhile, Bitcoin Core contributor Jon Atack is advising users to pause BTC transfers during the second week of August because of reorg risk.
This is less a release note and more a State Department travel advisory. “Be safe out there, plebs!”
Isn’t this just decentralization working?
No.
Also, “lol.”
It is governance, and it has been governance the whole time. Who decides what counts as “spam”? Who decides which valid, fee-paying transaction deserves to be relayed? Who decides what a node is even for? The answer has never changed: whoever controls the reference client controls the defaults, and whoever controls the defaults governs, exactly as I wrote in 2022.
Everyone else is Maggie Simpson with a toy steering wheel.
You have seen this movie because it never stops playing. In 2015, BIP101 and Bitcoin XT tried to scale the protocol and were purged so thoroughly that Mike Hearn left, declaring the entire Bitcoin experiment a failure, and maybe he was right. In 2017, BIP148, authored by a pseudonymous developer called Shaolin Fry (the tactic has a lineage), used the same flag-day “vote” to force SegWit through, while SegWit2x died with 58 companies and 80% of hashpower behind it. In 2021, Taproot nearly split the network over LOT=true versus LOT=false, a fight over nothing but how to force it on the network. In October 2025, Bitcoin Core v30 raised the OP_RETURN limit, driving thousands of node operators into Knots and escalating the civil war I wrote about when ordinals were new.
Five constitutional crises in eleven years, and every one of them was sold as the last one!
The funny part is that both parties are right about each other. The filterers are right that a monetary network that hauls JPEG collections at 7 transactions per second is an embarrassment to their “digital gold” ethos. The valid-is-valid camp is right that money that censors its paying customers is not money at all. Michael Saylor, BTC’s most over-leveraged evangelist, declared this week that BTC has “no spam problem” because fees sit at 1 satoshi per vbyte. He is technically right too, but only if you refuse to ask what 1 satoshi per vbyte means: blockspace demand has collapsed, miners are living on a shrinking subsidy, and the “spam” half the network wants to outlaw is the closest thing to organic fee revenue BTC has ever found. They are fighting a civil war over blocks nobody is bidding for anymore.
The end state of a purified BTC is an empty block—perfectly clean, perfectly sound, perfectly unused.
Sound money cannot have a legislature, because a legislature is a market for influence, and influence is exactly what proof of work was designed to price out. Explicitly. Satoshi settled this on June 17, 2010: “The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.” BSV took him literally: blocks are unbounded, data pays its way at market rates, and miners compete on service instead of ideology. Nobody holds a referendum on whether a paying customer is welcome.
BIP110 will probably fail in August; early polling suggests as much. But watch what does not happen next, nobody disarms. The losing faction will not update its conclusions, only its tactics, and somewhere a developer is already drafting the next ballot measure… The mechanism rewards it, and the mechanism itself is never on the ballot.
The spam war was never about spam.
It is a war over who governs BTC, and “who governs” never resolves to nobody. It resolves to whoever won most recently, ruling until the next flag day, forever.
Sound money does not hold elections.
This opinion piece is published to encourage discussion. The author’s views are their own and do not constitute legal, procurement, or policy advice, nor do they represent the positions of CoinGeek or its partners.
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