The number hit my screen at 06:47 UTC on a Tuesday.
0%.
That was the recorded miner signaling support for BIP 110. Not 5%, not 1%. Zero. In the cold arithmetic of Bitcoin governance, a perfect goose egg.
Then came Michael Saylor's statement, a predictable yet necessary hammer: Bitcoin must remain neutral, rejecting any attempt to filter transactions by content.
Two data points. One proposal dead on arrival. But what died here is not just a piece of code. It was a philosophy that tried to wrap Bitcoin in a censorship layer, dressed up as network hygiene.
Every timestamp is a potential crime scene. This one reads: the Ordinals experiment survives another day, but the fault line it exposed runs deeper than any single inscription.
Context: The Proposal That Almost Wasn't
BIP 110 is not new. It's a recurrent ghost that haunts Bitcoin's development cycle every time a non-financial use case gains traction. The proposal essentially calls for nodes to identify and reject transactions that carry large amounts of non-financial data—specifically, the inscription data used by Ordinals and similar protocols.
Think of it as a content filter for the mempool. If a transaction carries a payload that looks like an image or text inscription, the node should drop it. The stated goal: preserve block space for genuine financial transfers, prevent network bloat, and maintain Bitcoin's purity as a monetary network.
But purity is a dangerous word in cryptography. It implies a subjective judgment that code is not designed to make.
I've audited enough smart contracts to know that when humans try to encode morality into logic gates, they leak. The filter would need to define what constitutes 'financial' data. An encoded string of a hash? A multi-sig script with arbitrary data in an OP_RETURN? The boundary is as porous as a wet paper bag.
Core: Systematic Teardown of BIP 110
Let's skip the whitepaper poetry and go straight to the architecture. BIP 110, if implemented, would modify the Bitcoin Core reference client to perform content inspection on certain transaction fields. This is a fundamental shift in the consensus layer's role. Currently, Bitcoin validates structure—signatures, scripts, amounts—not semantics. BIP 110 requires the node to understand the meaning of the data being carried.
The technical chaos
Semantic inspection is computationally expensive. It's easy to say 'reject anything over 100 bytes that starts with ord'. But what if someone compresses the data? Or encrypts it? The filter would either become a game of cat-and-mouse (bypass filters by changing encoding) or require a full Turing-complete inspection engine. That's not an improvement; it's a bloat.
In my 2018 audit of the 0x Protocol v2, I found seven reentrancy vulnerabilities that automated tools missed because the tools didn't understand the business logic of the protocol. Similarly, a content filter for Bitcoin would need to understand the evolving logic of inscriptions. It would be outdated the moment a new encoding scheme appears.
The miner's dilemma
0% miner support is economic self-preservation. Since the Ordinals boom, miners have earned substantial fees from inscription-related transactions. In the bear market of 2025-2026, every satoshi counts. Filtering these transactions would be a direct pay cut.
But it's not just greed. It's game theory. If miners on one side of the fork filter Ordinals and the other doesn't, those on the filtering chain lose fee revenue and hash rate eventually migrates. The 0% signal is rational: why cut your own throat for a moral cause that has no measurable benefit?
The governance paradox
Saylor's opposition is interesting not because he's a technical contributor—he's not—but because he represents the largest concentrated Bitcoin holder in the public market. When he speaks, it's capital speaking.
In an ideal decentralized system, capital should have no louder voice than a hobbyist miner in Iceland. But the reality is that Bitcoin's governance is a triangle: developers propose, miners signal, and capital (or large holders) influences via public pressure. Saylor's statement is the capital vertex pushing back.
This is not inherently unhealthy, but it's a reminder that neutrality is maintained by active defense, not by automatic inertia.
The Ordinals ecosystem effect
Let's be blunt: BIP 110 would have killed the Ordinals economy overnight. No more inscriptions, no more BRC-20 tokens, no more Runes. That ecosystem, which has attracted a new wave of users and developers to Bitcoin, would be strangled in its crib.
I've spent hours reverse-engineering PFP minting contracts. I know how fragile those race conditions are. But the response to insecure code should be better code, not a protocol-level ban. Bitcoin's strength is its permissionlessness. You don't need anyone's approval to transact. BIP 110 would have broken that.
Contrarian: What the Bulls Got Right
I hate being fair to the proponents, but let's examine the counter-argument honestly.
First, block space is finite. With each halving, the subsidy shrinks, and transaction fees must eventually sustain the entire security budget. If non-financial data consumes a significant portion of block space, the fee pressure could crowd out legitimate financial transfers, especially during high-demand periods.
Second, there is a legitimate concern about network bloat. The UTXO set grows with each inscription, and while the impact today is marginal, a sustained Ordinals mania could increase node storage requirements. This could theoretically push small node operators out of the network, reducing decentralization.
Third, some argue that Ordinals represent a form of attack on the network's 'moneyness'. This is not a technical argument; it's a philosophical one. But philosophy matters in communities. If enough people believe Ordinals are a pollutant, the social consensus could shift.
These are not dumb arguments. They're just incomplete. They ignore the fact that node storage costs have been dropping exponentially, and that the fee market naturally disciplines usage. If the network gets too congested, users will bid up fees, and the market will decide what's worth including. That's the beauty of a market-based system.
Takeaway: The Filter is Off, For Now
What happened here is a stress test on Bitcoin's neutrality. The network passed. But the test is not over.
If Ordinals take off massively—say, ten times current volume—the fee pressure will become real. At that point, the miner calculus could shift. If fees from inscriptions surpass the revenue from normal transactions, miners might support a filter to reduce congestion and prevent a fee crash. Or they might not care, as long as they get paid.
The real risk is not BIP 110. It's the slow, creeping normalization of content-based discrimination in the protocol. Each small filter—for spam, for illegal content, for whatever the regulators demand—erodes the one feature that makes Bitcoin valuable: the guarantee that your transaction will be treated exactly like everyone else's, without prejudice.
Silence in the logs screams louder than alerts. Today, the logs are silent. The proposal is dead. But the ghost will return, maybe under a different number, maybe with different sponsors.
Code does not lie; it merely waits. And so do I.
The ledger bleeds where logic fails to bind.
