David Bailey, chairman of Nakamoto and CEO of BTC Inc, said the campaign behind BIP-110 has effectively failed, arguing that miner backing for the proposal remains below 1% of Bitcoin hashrate. The proposal seeks to restrict non-financial arbitrary data storage on Bitcoin, including uses tied to Ordinals-style inscriptions.
In a July 4 post on X, Bailey described the effort as a “hostile takeover” attempt and called its collapse a strongly positive signal for Bitcoin. He framed the episode as a long-running information war and made a series of accusations against the opposing camp, which observers have widely linked to Bitcoin Knots maintainer and Ocean pool founder Luke Dashjr, including pressure campaigns around UASF and attempts to shape perceived consensus.
On-chain signaling remains far from the activation threshold
BIP-110 is a soft fork proposal built around a UASF mechanism. Under the timeline cited in the source material, it would enter its mandatory signaling window between August 7 and August 15, 2026, around block height 961,632. If it reached 55% miner signaling ahead of that window, activation could be locked in.
That level of support is nowhere close. According to the figures referenced by Bailey, only 38 out of 9,066 blocks mined since May 1, 2026 have signaled support for BIP-110, or about 0.42%. Estimated by hashrate, support stands at roughly 0.31%. The first signaling block was mined by Ocean in March 2026, and no major mining pool has followed.
The dispute is really about Bitcoin’s purpose
Bailey argued that the weak showing reinforces an older lesson from Bitcoin governance: miners do not determine consensus on their own. In his view, economic weight across users, miners, companies, and developers carries more force than a narrow activist push, and BIP-110 has failed to win that broader support.
Luke Dashjr has taken the opposite position. He has said publicly that if BIP-110 fails, Bitcoin fails with it, warning that unrestricted use of Bitcoin as a data layer could push the network away from its monetary function. The disagreement goes beyond one proposal. It centers on whether Bitcoin should remain a narrowly defined monetary network or continue as an open ledger where anyone can write data.
Workarounds have already appeared before any activation
The source also notes that on July 2, programmer lifofifoX released an Ordinals update that splits large files into smaller fragments below BIP-110’s proposed limits, creating a path around the restriction. Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor has already verified the change on GitHub. That raises a practical question: even if BIP-110 were activated, it may still struggle to fully block the behavior it targets.
Bailey acknowledged costs on his own side as well. He said the episode exposed weaknesses in Bitcoin Core’s coordination process and showed how heavily the community still depends on Twitter for communication. He also called this the first major Bitcoin governance battle to be amplified by “AI slop,” estimating that the dispute has consumed more than one million hours of community time, energy, and cohesion over several years.