Whether Bitcoin splits or not, it’s hard to tell—BTC’s rise and fall remain elusive.

BTC has slipped back to around 63K. After getting stuck in a range for too long, even a small breeze of news can easily stir up waves.

The unsettling news comes from two big shots in the crypto world: Michael Saylor (Strategy CEO) and Adam Back (Blockstream CEO). Both have spoken out, opposing BIP-110.

Michael Saylor’s wording is clever. He said: For Bitcoin, there are 110 things more dangerous than junk information.

110 things. Exactly the number of BIP-110. The implication is that your proposal itself is just stirring trouble for no reason—blowing a small issue into a big one.

Adam Back was more direct: This proposal is meant to discipline others the way police do.

Their statements have dragged the BIP-110 topic, which had fallen quiet for months, back under the spotlight.

Coward’s game

What exactly is BIP-110?

In short: it’s a temporary soft-fork proposal aimed at restricting storage of non-monetary data on the Bitcoin chain.

More plainly, it seeks to ban the behavior of directly engraving things like Ordinals inscriptions—images, text, and token data—onto the Bitcoin blockchain.

The proposal was merged into the official BIP repository in December last year. JiaoChain previously wrote a full article of ten thousand words dissecting its technical details, “BIP-110 Detailed Breakdown”; afterward, it published a series of follow-ups in succession: “Satoshi Shows Opposition,” “First Blood,” “Lopp Opposes BIP-110,” “BIP-110 Prequel,” etc., providing a fairly complete record of the proposal’s journey—from its birth, to the controversy it sparked, to when miners started signaling.

Now half a year has passed. The forced signaling window for BIP-110 is expected to arrive in September this year (unconditional activation at block height 965664). JiaoChain took a look at bip110.org; in the most recent difficulty period, the signaling support rate has already exceeded 1%, reaching 1.2%.

1.2% doesn’t look high. Even pretty pathetic. It’s far from the 55% early-activation threshold.

But anyone who read JiaoChain’s March 2 article “First Blood” should remember that, at the end of the piece, JiaoChain did an estimate. The threshold for the probability of rejection was only about 0.6%, not more than 1%.

Back then, JiaoChain wrote: “That is, if the risk probability that UASF losses for miners exceed the proportion of block rewards per entire block is more than 6 per thousand, then it will be enough to force miners to turn toward BIP-110.”

Now, the signaling support rate is already above 1%, at 1.2%. That means that when September’s forced signaling starts, miners who do not switch away from BIP-110 making blocks will face a 1.2% chance of being rejected—incurring losses—while switching to BIP-110 will carry no loss risk at all.

This is a coward’s game.

So, at this point in time, for Michael Saylor and Adam Back to come out and oppose it is especially thought-provoking.

Are the reasons from the opposition valid?

Adam Back said that anti-spam rules conflict with the philosophy of freedom and permissionlessness for money. Michael Saylor said that turning the debate over spam into a change at the consensus layer would render some currently valid, fee-paying transactions invalid.

These remarks sound solemn and righteous, of course. The protocol shouldn’t be changed lightly. Once you set a precedent of using consensus rules to constrain everyone’s use of Bitcoin, the slippery-slope effect is a real risk.

But that’s not the whole truth.

From the perspective of externalities, you can also see the other side of the coin.

When JiaoChain discussed this issue with its assistant, it drew a four-quadrant framework to analyze it:

• First quadrant: individuals benefit, and the public interest also benefits. No moral constraints needed. (laissez-faire)

• Second quadrant: individuals sacrifice, and the public interest benefits. No moral constraints needed—compensation is required. (honor)

• Fourth quadrant: individuals benefit, and the public interest is harmed. Strict moral constraints are required. (rule of law)

Of course there’s also the so-called third quadrant where one harms others but doesn’t benefit oneself—that’s stupid. What’s needed is enlightenment, a cure for ignorance. (education)

Miners charge fees to package inscription transactions, so individual benefit is positive. But these data are permanently stored on all full nodes; the storage cost is borne by node operators, so the public interest is negative.

This is a textbook fourth quadrant.

Following the logic of the four quadrants, the fourth quadrant requires strict moral constraints. BIP-110 is the consensus-layer form of such moral constraints—code as law. When lower-layer approaches—strategy-layer filtering, community discussion, vulnerability patches—are each rejected or neutralized one by one, the community is forced to appeal to the consensus layer.

When an action creates an objective, measurable negative externality, and all mild means have been exhausted, saying the protocol should remain neutral is tantically allowing the side that harms and fattens itself to continue profiting.

So, for the opposition’s attempt to take a laissez-faire stance in the fourth quadrant, as an ordinary node operator, it’s hard to agree.

But the dilemma facing supporters is also real

And for ordinary people, beyond understanding, there’s not much more they can do.

Those who support BIP-110 are trying to stand in the second quadrant—asking miners to sacrifice a bit of fee profit in exchange for lower node operating costs and the maintenance of network decentralization.

The second quadrant requires something else to compensate for the sacrifice. But Bitcoin is a pure non-productive system: it doesn’t create incremental value. The value of block rewards comes from capital flowing in from outside the system.

Without incremental value, there’s nothing to compensate miners for their sacrifice.

Unless miners are extremely focused on community reputation. But Bitcoin miners are, by nature, anonymous—among the whole ecosystem, they’re the group that cares most about short-term interests. Trying to use a path similar to open-source software—providing honor compensation to developers through attribution—would be hard to make work here.

So, it seems the only remaining route is punishment: reject non-compliant blocks with enough nodes so that the violating miners’ hash power is wasted. Use punishment to deter.

This approach worked in the 2017 segwit UASF (BIP-148). At the very last moment before the deadline, miners relented and compromised, and they all switched to support segwit.

But BIP-110 and BIP-148 have a fundamental difference:

BIP-148 rejects unsignaled blocks. The transactions inside the rejected blocks have no inherent problem; the only issue is that the block header is missing a version marker.

BIP-110 rejects unsignaled blocks as well, but those blocks may contain violating transactions. And these so-called violating transactions are fully legitimate in the eyes of old nodes.

This means the fees contained in those violating transactions would only be collected by the old, unsignaled nodes.

The game structure changes subtly.

Supporting BIP-148 generally means supporters don’t lose any fee income from transactions. But supporting BIP-110 means supporters, in general, will lose the fees carried by the so-called violating transactions.

This subtle shift would make miners’ trade-off move from mindless following—“the drawback of block rejection vs the benefit of smooth block production”—to weighing between “the drawback of block rejection” and “the drawback of losing fees,” choosing the lesser evil.

But can miners truly calculate which evil is heavier and which is lighter?

Ordinary people’s prayers

In the end, we are just ordinary people on the Bitcoin network.

Not Core maintainers, not big mining-pool bosses, and not exchange operators.

For the controversy around BIP-110, what insights can ordinary people have?

Regarding the opposition’s laissez-faire stance, an ordinary node operator doesn’t agree—because letting the fourth-quadrant behavior run unchecked isn’t neutrality; it’s indulgence.

As for the motives of the supporters, ordinary people can understand to some extent. Regardless of whether the end result succeeds, daring to challenge the existing order in itself is a stance.

Ordinary people also understand the dilemma supporters face. In a non-productive system, there’s no incremental value to compensate the ones who sacrifice; only punishment can deter, and punishment requires enough people to stand up to carry it out.

But in the end, ordinary people only have one simple wish:

Hope it doesn’t lead to a chain split.

Once a split happens, the collapse of trust across the entire BTC system might deal a heavy blow to everyone present.

Maybe that’s also one of the incentives that led many ancient whales to “wake up” and do big sell-offs after last year’s Core insisted on upgrading to V30 and deleting the data size limit—triggering controversy.

The whales jumped ship one after another, showing that they had little confidence in whether this ship would be split or sink.

It’s said that during the 2025 bull market, the opposition heavyweight Adam Back also did some major moves. According to reports from multiple media outlets, he once injected tens of thousands of BTC into Cantor Fitzgerald’s SPAC to obtain equity, and also adjusted off-balance positions via Galaxy Digital [2]. On the surface, it looked like asset restructuring; in practice, it resembles a carefully designed exchange—turning coins from a personal wallet into equity that benefits from instant liquidity in US stock markets, while maintaining BTC net exposure and unlocking fiat liquidity. He got the “credibility” of not having to sell coins at a high point, and also got the “guts” of exchanging risk for dollar liquidity. Truly top-tier capital operations.

Michael Saylor, who had been happily hoarding coins, maybe finally caught up with the implications—so that he jumped out and pushed hard against everyone continuing to cause trouble.

But consensus isn’t voting, and consensus isn’t a courtroom.

No one has the authority to make the final decision unilaterally for the Bitcoin system.

For an ordinary person still on the ship, all they can do is silently pray that this great ship—having sailed through storms and survived nine deaths—doesn’t experience a split this autumn that would be too painful to witness.