Michael Saylor fires a second salvo at BIP-110 soft fork: Bitcoin needs neutrality, not “monetary purity”

Strategy founder Michael Saylor escalates his campaign against BIP-110, directly calling out that trying to change Bitcoin’s rules merely because he does not approve of the way others use Bitcoin is a nationalist impulse. It runs counter to the spirit of freedom, property rights, free markets, and Austrian economics that the Bitcoin community has long embraced, and in essence it forcibly pushes “monetary purity” through legal means.
(Background: Michael Saylor listed 110 reasons to reject BIP-110: Bitcoin doesn’t need a fork, and cleaning blocks is stupid.)
(Additional context: Michael Saylor and Adam Back team up to counterattack BIP-110: the junk-inscription war of Bitcoin Ordinals.)

Key takeaways

• Saylor says BIP-110 is a push for “monetary purity” through legal means, and that it’s a nationalist impulse
• Within roughly a one-year effective period, BIP-110 would add 7 consensus restrictions; the threshold is only 55%, far below BIP-9’s 95%
• The forced signaling window opens on August 7; miner support is 0%, and cumulative support since May has never exceeded 1%

Strategy founder Michael Saylor has recently said again that simply because he does not approve of how others use Bitcoin, he is trying to change Bitcoin’s rules—this is a nationalist impulse that is at odds with the spirit of freedom, property rights, free markets, and Austrian economics that the Bitcoin community has long upheld. He characterizes BIP-110 as forcing “monetary purity” through legal means, which does not align with Bitcoin’s core decentralization ethos.

The impulse to change Bitcoin’s rules merely to prevent others from using Bitcoin in ways you disapprove of is statist and alien to a community rooted in liberty, property rights, free markets, natural law, and Austrian economics. BIP 110 would impose monetary purity by fiat.

— Michael Saylor (@saylor) July 21, 2026

This is his second time this month taking a stance on the same proposal. On July 19, Saylor published a long-form piece titled “Reasons Why 110 BIP-110 Is a Bad Idea,” and his arguments were still at the governance layer. The proposal seeks to use consensus rules to restrict transaction use cases that are still effective today and that are willing to pay transaction fees—effectively upgrading the fight over using data storage for those purposes into protocol-layer rules.

A dangerous number: 55%

Within BIP-110’s planned effective period of about one year (52,416 blocks), it would add 7 consensus restrictions to Bitcoin:

• OP_RETURN output limit: 83 bytes
• Majority-push data and witness item limit: 256 bytes
• Prohibit spending undefined witness versions and Tapleaf versions
• Disable Taproot annex; control block limit: 257 bytes
• Reject certain Tapscript opcodes and branches

Saylor’s most concentrated attack is on the activation threshold. BIP-110 uses a 55% miner signaling threshold, which is clearly lower than BIP-9’s 95% standard, and it removes the standard timeout mechanism and the FAILED state. In his view, this design would increase the probability of coordination mistakes, chain splits, and market uncertainty.

What he’s trying to block is a “governance precedent”

Saylor argues that block space fees, node forwarding policies, miner strategies, node pruning, and Layer 2 are all tools sufficient to address the related issues without touching consensus. He emphasizes that even if the rules are only temporarily effective, the governance precedent they establish could still persist for the long term—so “the proposed governance solution is more dangerous than the problem itself.”

The real-world numbers, however, are quite brutal. According to TFTC statistics from the Bitcoin media, the forced signaling window for BIP-110 will open at block 961,632, expected around August 7. If no large mining pool crosses the 55% threshold, this proposal will only result in a minority chain. Currently, miner signaling is 0%, and cumulative support since May has never exceeded 1%. The peak has been around 5 EH/s, compared with the network’s total hashrate of about 940 EH/s.

With a support rate that is nearly zero, Saylor has gone after it twice within two weeks. Evidently, what he wants to block is not the vote itself, but this kind of voting mechanism.

Frequently asked questions

What is BIP-110?

BIP-110 is an approximately one-year temporary soft fork. During its effective period of 52,416 blocks, it adds 7 consensus restrictions, including an OP_RETURN output limit of 83 bytes and an upper limit of 256 bytes for majority-push data and witness items. Its purpose is to reduce arbitrary data storage on the Bitcoin chain.

Why does Michael Saylor oppose BIP-110?

Saylor believes that the proposal uses consensus rules to restrict transaction types that are still currently valid and that are willing to pay transaction fees—effectively providing the community with legitimacy for those usage patterns. He also opposes the 55% miner signaling threshold, which is far below BIP-9’s 95%, because it could increase the risk of chain splits.