We burned out trying to own the future. That phrase echoed in my mind as I watched the BIP-110 fork collapse into irrelevance, producing only two blocks in eight hours โ a mere 4% of the expected 48 blocks. It was a quiet implosion, not a dramatic spectacle. But for those of us who have spent years parsing the signals beneath the surface of Bitcoin's consensus layer, this failure was a distillation of everything that makes this network both resilient and sclerotic.
Context: The Proposal That Almost Wasn't
BIP-110, as its proponents framed it, was a virtuous attempt to 'cleanse' Bitcoin's block space. The proposal aimed to restrict non-financial data writes โ specifically, the Ordinals inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens that had turned the blockchain into a digital canvas for memes, art, and speculative assets. The mechanism was a User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF): at block height 961,632, nodes running BIP-110 would reject any block that did not include a signal of support for the new rules. This was not the standard BIP-9 miner-activated soft fork, which requires 95% hashrate signaling over a difficulty adjustment period. Instead, it was a unilateral imposition by a minority of node operators, forcing miners to choose between accepting the new rules or having their blocks orphaned on the fork.
The timing was peculiar. The proposal had only garnered 2.53% support in the previous signaling period โ 51 out of 2,016 blocks โ far below the 55% activation threshold that the proposal itself demanded. Yet a small group of nodes decided to enforce activation anyway. The result was a schism: a parallel chain that, as of the last data point, had stalled at height 961,633, while the main chain continued to produce blocks up to 961,681 without interruption. The BIP-110 chain, lacking computational power, was essentially a ghost network.
Core: The Anatomy of a Failure โ Data, Incentives, and the Governance Trilemma
To understand why BIP-110 failed, we must look beyond the code and into the economic realities that underpin Bitcoin's security model. The core insight is that the proposal attacked the very income stream that miners have come to rely on since the Ordinals boom began in early 2023. In my own auditing work during the DeFi Summer of 2020, I learned that protocols often fail not because they are technically flawed, but because they ignore the incentive structures of the key stakeholders. BIP-110 is a textbook case.
Data Point 1: The Hashrate Reality The new chain's output โ 2 blocks in 8 hours โ implies a hashrate of roughly 4% of the main chain. With Bitcoin's total hashrate hovering around 500 EH/s, the BIP-110 chain was operating at approximately 20 EH/s, likely contributed by a single small mining pool or a handful of ideologically-driven miners. This is insufficient to secure the chain against a 51% attack, let alone maintain consistent block production. The main chain, meanwhile, continued at its standard 10-minute interval, indifferent to the rebellion.
Data Point 2: The Economic Signal The 2.53% signaling support is not just a number; it's a referendum on the proposal's economic viability. Miners, who collectively earn transaction fees alongside block subsidies, have seen their fee income from Ordinals-related transactions grow to roughly 10-15% of total revenue during periods of high activity. BIP-110 would have eliminated this revenue stream entirely. When faced with a choice between a 10-15% pay cut and the status quo, the rational decision is obvious. The miners voted with their hash.
Data Point 3: The Ordinals Ecosystem at Risk For the Ordinals and BRC-20 ecosystem, BIP-110 represented an existential threat. If successful, it would have rendered all existing inscriptions unspendable on the newly enforced rules, effectively destroying billions of dollars in market capitalization. The fork's failure, therefore, is a massive tail-risk removal for these assets. But it also raises a subtle point: the protocol-level defense against censorship has been tested and failed. The only thing protecting Ordinals now is the economic interest of miners. That is a fragile shield.
The Governance Trilemma Bitcoin's governance is often described as a tension between three forces: developers (who write the code), miners (who produce the blocks), and users (who run the nodes and transact). BIP-110 attempted to short-circuit this trilemma by having a subset of nodes enforce a rule without miner consent. The result was a clear demonstration that in Bitcoin, the ultimate power resides with the miners. They are the ones who can kill a fork by simply ignoring it. The 8-hour lifespan of the BIP-110 chain is a testament to this reality. It was never a 'fork' in the sense of a viable alternative; it was a protest that was quickly abandoned.
First-Person Technical Experience Based on my experience auditing the social implications of yield farming in 2020, I can say that the BIP-110 failure is a classic case of 'code is law' being overridden by 'hash is power'. The proponents believed that by writing a new rule, they could enforce it. But Bitcoin is not a software platform; it is a socio-economic system where the cost of producing blocks is real, and the incentive to participate is measured in satoshis. The UASF path was chosen precisely because the standard path (BIP-9) had failed to gain traction. The forced activation was an act of desperation, not strategy.
The hidden information here is that the BIP-110 supporters may have been influenced by a regulatory pressure โ the fear that Ordinals would attract SEC scrutiny and bring down regulation on Bitcoin itself. By attempting to self-censor, they hoped to preempt government action. But their failure means that the external regulatory risk remains. The SEC's case against NFT marketplaces is ongoing, and the legal status of inscriptions is still unresolved. BIP-110's failure does not eliminate that risk; it merely postpones it.
Contrarian: The Fork That Never Was โ And the Fragility of Resilience
The conventional narrative is that the BIP-110 failure proves Bitcoin's resilience. The network rejected a harmful change, and the status quo prevailed. But I see a darker undercurrent. The fact that a small group of nodes could even create a fork with only 2.53% support reveals a vulnerability in Bitcoin's governance: the absence of a formal mechanism to prevent such unilateral actions. The 'code is law' ethos allows anyone to fork, but the real cost is borne by the community in terms of confusion, potential for replay attacks, and wasted energy. The BIP-110 fork was small, but what if the next one has more support?
More importantly, the failure of BIP-110 solidifies the alliance between miners and the Ordinals ecosystem. Miners now have a vested interest in maintaining the ability to inscribe data on Bitcoin. This could lead to a form of 'regulatory capture' where miners become dependent on a revenue stream that is inherently volatile โ the meme-driven speculation of BRC-20 tokens. If the Ordinals bubble bursts, miners will lose that income, but they will have already shaped their own incentive structure around it. The BIP-110 failure, in effect, entrenches the very thing its opponents wanted to eliminate.
Another counter-intuitive angle: the BIP-110 fork might actually be a net positive for Bitcoin maximalists. By failing so spectacularly, it discredits the entire approach of UASF and forced activations. Future proposals that try to restrict block space usage will have to find a different path โ perhaps through market-based mechanisms like fee market reforms or voluntary miner filtering. This could lead to a more sophisticated debate about what Bitcoin's block space should be used for, rather than a binary 'ban or allow' choice.
We burned out trying to own the future. But the future, it seems, is owned by the miners who collect fees from dog memes and digital collectibles. The irony is palpable.
Takeaway: The Next Narrative โ Incentives, Not Ideology
The BIP-110 saga is a lesson in the primacy of economics over ideology. The next battle over Bitcoin's block space will not be fought on the level of node rules; it will be fought in the fee market. Proposals like OP_CAT or BIP-119 (CTV) that enable new use cases are more likely to gain traction because they align with miner incentives. The Ordinals ecosystem, having survived this threat, should not become complacent. The regulatory sword still hangs over the market, and the miners' loyalty is contingent on profit.
As I watch the main chain continue to produce blocks, each one a quiet affirmation of the status quo, I am reminded of the phrase I wrote in my cabin in Benguet during the NFT frenzy: 'Soulless tokens, but the soul of the network is the hunger for yield.' BIP-110 attacked that hunger, and the hunger won. The question now is: what will the next hungry proposal look like?