The data suggests that a political storm within Bitcoin's governance is not a storm at all—it is a carefully calibrated vote of apathy. Over the past seven days, the signaling support for BIP-110, a proposal designed to modify Bitcoin's block size limits in a way that could effectively disable the Ordinals protocol, has dropped below 1% of the network's hashrate. With only three weeks left before the supposed implementation deadline, the code's fate is sealed. The miners have spoken, not with force, but with silence.
Hook
On paper, BIP-110 was a technical mechanism—a modification to the rules governing transaction data capacity. In practice, it was a Trojan horse for a social war. The proposal's advocates, whom Adam Back sharply dismissed as 'people who don't understand Bitcoin,' spent months lobbying for a change that would render Ordinals inscriptions—the NFT-like artifacts minted directly on the Bitcoin blockchain—impossible. The narrative was simple: Ordinals are spam; they bloat the chain, drive up fees, and attract regulatory scrutiny. The solution was to tweak the consensus layer, specifically the OP_RETURN opcode constraints, to prevent large data payloads. The path seemed clear. The deadline was set. The pressure was mounting.
Context
To understand this moment, one must rewind to 2021. As the NFT boom consumed Ethereum, a smaller group of Bitcoin developers saw an opportunity. The Ordinals protocol, pioneered by Casey Rodarmor, allowed users to inscribe arbitrary data onto individual satoshis—the smallest units of Bitcoin—by leveraging the SegWit and Taproot upgrades. It was elegant. It was permissionless. And it was immediately controversial. Bitcoin maximalists decried it as a corruption of the network's purpose (digital gold, not digital art). Others saw it as a natural evolution of a censorship-resistant ledger. For two years, the debate raged in forums and Twitter threads. But no one had actually tried to change the protocol to kill it. Until now.
Core
The core of this story is not about code—it is about the architecture of power in a trustless system. Bitcoin's governance is often described as 'rough consensus and running code,' but that glosses over the reality: miners hold the ultimate veto. BIP-110 was a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal that proposed altering the block size validation logic in a way that would invalidate many Ordinals transactions. The specific technical mechanism (the change to block size limits) is irrelevant; what matters is the intent. And the market—in this case, the miners—saw through it immediately.
Based on my audit experience during the ICO boom of 2017, I learned to separate genuine technical improvements from disguised political agendas. Back then, I analyzed 15 whitepapers and found mathematical inconsistencies in 8; the pattern was the same. When a proposal's primary justification is moral panic rather than network security, the data will betray the narrative. Here, the data is unequivocal: hash rate signaling for BIP-110 started at around 5% in early January, then collapsed to below 1% within weeks. This is not a failure of persuasion; it is a coordinated rejection by the most powerful stakeholders in the ecosystem. The miners, who profit directly from Ordinals transactions fees (often accounting for 15-30% of total fees on some days), voted with their hardware. As I wrote in my post-LUNA collapse post-mortem, 'The Fragility of Synthetic Anchors,' the first rule of network security is that economic incentives will override ideological purity.
But there is a deeper layer. Adam Back's public dismissal of BIP-110's advocates as 'people who don't understand Bitcoin' is not just a technical critique—it is a warning about governance corruption. The architecture of value in a trustless system demands that changes be driven by necessity, not by a desire to censor a specific application. The 'Ordinals are spam' argument is a policy preference, not a technical requirement. To use the protocol's upgrade mechanism to enforce that preference sets a dangerous precedent: if miners can agree to ban one transaction type, they can agree to ban another. The community understood this. The miners understood this. And they said no.
Contrarian
Now, the predictable conclusion is that BIP-110's death is a victory for Ordinals and a failure for the anti-Ordinals camp. That is true, but it is also the least interesting inference. The contrarian angle is this: the real risk is not that a proposal fails, but that miners will implement censorship without a formal proposal. BIP-110 was a soft fork that required signaling and activation. But miners have a simpler tool: transaction selection. If large mining pools decide to filter out Ordinals transactions from their block templates, they could effectively starve the protocol of confirmation capacity. This does not require any consensus change—it is a purely operational decision. And unlike BIP-110, it would be invisible to most observers, hidden inside proprietary node software.
I have seen this pattern before. During the LUNA crash, the 'algorithmic stability' narrative collapsed not because of a single vote, but because of a cascade of under-the-radar decisions by validators and liquidators. In the current case, the loudest victory for Ordinals supporters may be followed by a quiet, grinding erosion. Miners who opposed BIP-110 for economic reasons may still resent the chain bloat. If fee pressure from Ordinals continues to push ordinary transaction costs above $20 per transfer, the social pressure will shift. Governments might step in. And when that happens, the same miners who rejected a hard kill may embrace a soft one. Following the code where the humans fear to tread—the code of miner behavior, not the BIP process—is where the next story will unfold.
Takeaway
The BIP-110 saga is a masterclass in Bitcoin governance: it shows that the network is resilient against popular moral crusades, but it also exposes a vulnerability. The governance process is designed to be slow and conservative, but it cannot prevent informal coercion. The question for the next three months is not whether Ordinals survive—they will. The question is whether the anti-Ordinals faction will pivot from protocol change to miner pressure. If they do, the narrative will shift from 'Bitcoin unchanged' to 'Bitcoin subtly changed.' And that is a story the 'digital gold' thesis cannot afford to ignore.
Deconstructing the myth of utility in the NFT boom—Ordinals proved utility exists, but at a cost. Charting the entropy of digital scarcity—the entropy here is the gradual degradation of neutrality. The architecture of value in a trustless system remains intact, but the mortar is cracking. As I often say, code does not lie, but narratives do. The narrative that BIP-110 was defeated by pure logic is comforting. The reality is that it was defeated by money. And money has no loyalty.