Recently, the Bitcoin community has started arguing again. Ocean Pool mined the first block supporting the BIP-110 proposal, which directly ignited discussion across the entire community.

The logic behind this BIP proposal is actually quite straightforward—by means of a temporary soft fork, it would limit those non-financial arbitrary data on the blockchain within roughly a year. Supporters say this would remove the “junk” data that occupies block space, bring Bitcoin back to its monetary essence, and also ease the burden on node operators. Sounds reasonable, right?

But the problem is this. Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream, and others stepped forward to openly oppose it. Their core argument is that intervening at the consensus layer would undermine Bitcoin’s credibility, and doing so is effectively treating different transactions differently—contradicting the principle of transaction capacity neutrality. Even more troubling, they also question how much genuine community support the BIP proposal truly has, worrying that if this continues, it could actually increase the risk of a blockchain split.

The controversy is still escalating. Some developers have directly embedded a 66KB image into Bitcoin transactions, rebutting the logic of BIP-110 with action of their own, showing that large amounts of data can be encoded even without OP_RETURN. This is no longer purely a technical debate—it has turned into a clash of ideas.

At the end of the day, this debate over the BIP proposal reflects a fundamental split within the Bitcoin community: whether Bitcoin should be tightly locked into its role as a currency, or whether the base layer should remain as neutral as possible, allowing for all kinds of uses. There’s no simple answer to this question, but with every community vote, Bitcoin’s future is being redefined.