BIP-110 draws less than 1% miner support as Bitcoin spam debate deepens

A proposal to purge non-financial data from Bitcoin has drawn less than 1% miner backing, while a rival client seeks to do the opposite without any vote at all.

Bitcoin's BIP-110, a soft fork that would restrict Ordinals, BRC-20 and Runes data on the network, has secured less than 1% miner support with its lock-in deadline approaching in early August.

"There are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam," Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy, wrote on X. "BIP-110 turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions."

The proposal, known as the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, would cap new transaction outputs at 34 bytes, restore an 83-byte limit on OP_RETURN outputs and restrict several Taproot features commonly used for inscriptions. Only Ocean, the mining pool co-founded by BIP-110 supporter Luke Dashjr, has signaled for the change. Bitcoin Core, the software running on the vast majority of network nodes, will not integrate the proposal.

The debate cuts to the core of Bitcoin's identity. BIP-110's supporters argue the network needs protection from blockchain spam that drives up fees and congests blocks. Critics say changing consensus rules to filter specific transaction types would set a precedent for censorship, undermining the neutrality that has defined Bitcoin since its creation in 2009.

A fork with almost no votes

BIP-110 relies on a User-Activated Soft Fork, or UASF, a mechanism that lets node operators enforce new rules even without miner consensus. The threshold for miner signaling was set at 55% over a 2,016-block period — far below the 95% typical for Bitcoin upgrades — yet support has never exceeded roughly 1% in any signaling period, according to the BIP-110 monitor.

The current signaling window runs from block 957,600 to block 959,615. A voluntary lock-in deadline at block 961,542, expected in early August, would trigger activation around September for nodes running BIP-110 software. In practice, a rule enforced by a handful of nodes and nearly zero miners would produce a minority chain split rather than change the main network.

F2Pool has openly opposed the proposal. No large mining pools — Foundry USA or AntPool among them — have joined the initiative.

DOG Mode offers the opposite fix

Five days after CoinDesk reported BIP-110's lack of miner support, Leonidas, co-founder of the Runestone project and a leading figure in the Ordinals ecosystem, announced an open-source Bitcoin client called DOG Mode. Rather than restrict data, it would relax Bitcoin Core's relay policies to allow near-block-size transactions and cut the dust limit from as much as 546 satoshis to a single satoshi.

DOG Mode would raise the maximum standard transaction from 400,000 weight units to 3.9 million. A Bitcoin block holds 4 million weight units, meaning Core currently relays nothing larger than a tenth of a block. Leonidas claims cutting the dust limit would free about $25 million in "padding" currently locked in Ordinals and Runes outputs.

Unlike BIP-110, DOG Mode changes only what a single node forwards, not the consensus rules. It requires no miner vote and no signaling window. But it also has no code — no repository, no version, no benchmark as of the announcement.

The two proposals represent opposing visions for Bitcoin's future. BIP-110 would rewrite the rulebook and needs a supermajority it does not have. DOG Mode would change only relay policy and needs a single miner willing to accept the fees. One requires the network's consent; the other requires nobody's. Neither has produced code that could alter how Bitcoin functions today.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.