Saylor Blasts BIP 110, Calls It 'Dangerous Precedent' - U.Today

• "110 things more dangerous than spam"
• "Policing" transactions Both Michael Saylor, founder of Strategy, and Adam Back, co-founder of Blockstream and inventor of Hashcash, have opposed the implementation of the extremely controversial Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 (BIP 110)

They believe that the measure threatens the foundational principles of the network.

"110 things more dangerous than spam"

BIP 110 seeks to implement protocol-level filters to reject transactions deemed as "spam" (arbitrary data, such as digital artifacts or tokens, into the blockchain)

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Saylor, whose corporate treasury holds over 843,000 Bitcoin, recently took to X's social media network to oppose the proposal. "There are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam," Saylor stated on X.

As noted by Saylor, the controversial proposal turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions," Saylor explained.

For Saylor, the mechanism proposed to implement it is the real danger. "That precedent is the danger," he warned. "We should save our energy for threats that really matter."

"Policing" transactions

Back, a veteran cryptographer who was cited in the original Bitcoin whitepaper, warned that the approach BIP 110 supports is actually at odds with the ethos of permissionless money.

"The decentralization needed to create cypherpunk money has implications," Back wrote in a lengthy post. "A side effect of decentralization is that you can't impose your views on others. The very decentralization mechanism that helps that is working against what BIP 110 wants, which at its most basic is a quest to police other people."

Back claims that hates spam "with a passion," but attempting to mandate behavior at the protocol level is a mistake. "You can modify your software, but not anyone else's," he noted. "Bitcoin can't have people who don't understand technology basics insist on eroding security, decentralization robustness and core properties."

Pushing BIP 110 forward without consensus will inevitably result in a network split, according to Back. "If you won't listen to reason, educate yourself, learn, the same radical freedom applies to you: your permissionless recourse is to club together and create a fork," Back stated bluntly. "But Bitcoin won't be joining it."

Back also pushed back against community claims that the Bitcoin Core developer team is being manipulated by outside funding. "Funders of not-for-profits are 'no strings', not even taking part in the grant decisions," Back clarified. He noted that donors often don't even review the annual summaries of what developers worked on. "They just want to help BTC stay robust."