Historically, Bitcoin consensus rules have treated valid transactions equally, regardless of their purpose. BIP-110 raised concerns that rules intended to discourage one category of transactions risked opening the door to future restrictions on others.
BIP-110 rejected
The means by which the proposal sought approval were equally controversial. Bitcoin upgrades are typically only made after overwhelming support has emerged among miners, businesses, wallet providers, and the ecosystem at large. BIP-110 instead revived discussion of a user-led activation approach, with updated nodes enforcing the new rules if predefined conditions were met.
Supporters saw this as a necessary safeguard if miners refused to act against what they saw as abuse of block space. Opponents warned that attempting to introduce new consensus rules without broad agreement risked creating incompatible versions of Bitcoin, a scenario many veterans still associate with the divisive block size wars of 2017.
This was where BIP-110 failed to gain support. Mining companies had little inventiveness to reject transactions that paid competitive fees, while institutional investors had no appetite for governance battles.
Michael Saylor, founder of Strategy, the largest bitcoin holding company said BIP-110 “converts a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid payment transactions.”
“That precedent is the danger,” he wrote in X on July 11. “We must save our energy for the threats that really matter.”
