Michael Saylor and Adam Back Team Up to Counterattack BIP-110: Bitcoin Ordinals’ Spam Inscription War

Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor and Blockstream founder Adam Back spoke out at the same time to oppose the Bitcoin protocol upgrade proposal BIP-110, issuing a challenge to Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions.
(Background: Adam Back responded to BIP-361 “freezing Satoshi BTC”: the threat is still far off, but it’s time to prepare for an upgrade now.)
(Additional background: Strategy Michael Saylor said BTC annualized returns could rise by 3.3%, and STRC dividends could be paid indefinitely.)

Table of Contents

Toggle

• What is BIP-110?
• In fact, Ordinals is already in a “silent decline”
• Activation conditions and progress
• Taiwan connection

Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor and Blockstream founder Adam Back spoke out at the same time to oppose the Bitcoin protocol upgrade proposal BIP-110, issuing a challenge to Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions.

What is BIP-110 about?

BIP-110 is Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) No. 110, proposed in December 2025 by an anonymous developer “Dathon Ohm,” with Luke Dashjr, co-founder of the Ocean protocol, supporting it.

The core of the proposal is simple: limit non-currency transactions on the Bitcoin network—namely Ordinals inscriptions (similar to NFT “minting”) and any other arbitrary data—so that Bitcoin returns to its original positioning as a peer-to-peer cash system.

In an X post, Michael Saylor was blunt: “For Bitcoin, at least 110 things are more dangerous than garbage,” emphasizing that BIP-110 would turn a simple garbage debate into a consensus change, potentially making some currently valid transactions on the Bitcoin network invalid.

In fact, Ordinals is already in a “silent decline”

According to Dune Analytics data, in the past month, the number of newly added Ordinals inscriptions per day was under 10k. Compared with the peak in August 2023, when it exceeded 400k per day, it has already fallen significantly.

In another post, Adam Back described BIP-110 as “an act of managing other people,” and noted that Bitcoin’s decentralization should mean that “you can’t impose your views on others.” This doesn’t align with the crypto pioneer spirit of Bitcoin—an unpermissioned, censorship-resistant currency.

Activation conditions and progress

BIP-110 requires 55% of Bitcoin nodes to support the proposal within a certain “period” for it to be activated. In the latest cycle (Epoch 475, blocks 955,584 to 957,599), only 1% of the blocks supported the proposal.

BIP-110 supporter Luke Dashjr pointed out that the inflation caused by Ordinals is a “serious threat,” and emphasized that BIP-110 would not lead to a chain split. The proposal sets only a one-year temporary restriction and would not permanently invalidate paid transactions.

This is seen as one of the most notable protocol-level disputes in the Bitcoin developer community since the “block size wars” from 2015 to 2017.

Taiwan connection

As Taiwan is a major crypto hub in Asia, the Bitcoin Ordinals ecosystem has also been planned early there. When Asia’s first large-scale Ordinals event was held in Singapore in 2023, the Taiwan community also actively participated. Michael Saylor mentioned as early as 2023 that MicroStrategy has been paying attention to the Ordinals protocol, saying there are “many application potential.”

Adam Back also came to Taiwan in November 2024 and held a seminar at the Legislative Yuan to explain, using Bitcoin Layer 2 as an example, the possible tokenization of Taiwan assets. Now his position against BIP-110 echoes the logic of “letting the Bitcoin ecosystem grow freely first.”