Bitcoin anti-spam fight gets DOG Mode challenger as 1% back BIP 110

Bitcoin's governance battle escalated July 17 as DOG Mode, a competing client, emerged to counter BIP 110 — a proposal backed by less than 1% of miners.

Blockstream Chief Executive Officer Adam Back and Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor have publicly opposed BIP 110, arguing it would invalidate currently valid, fee-paying transactions and set a dangerous precedent for altering Bitcoin's consensus rules, according to posts on X.

BIP 110 would tighten Bitcoin's consensus rules by limiting OP_RETURN outputs to 83 bytes, capping witness elements at 256 bytes, and temporarily restricting Taproot features commonly used for inscriptions. The proposal's mandatory signaling period begins in August, yet only 1% of miners have signaled support, according to the proposal's monitoring dashboard.

The dispute threatens to fragment Bitcoin's development community at a time when the network faces competing visions for its future. DOG Mode, launched by Runestone co-founder Leonidas, takes the opposite approach by raising the transaction size limit from 400,000 to 3.9 million weight units — a nearly tenfold increase — without requiring a consensus change or miner vote.

Back, who invented the Hashcash proof-of-work system that underpins Bitcoin's security model, said in a lengthy statement that BIP 110 conflicts with Bitcoin's decentralized, permissionless design. "The decentralization needed to create cypherpunk money has implications," Back wrote. "A side effect of decentralization is that you can't impose your views on others."

Saylor echoed the concern, writing that "there are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam" and that BIP 110 "turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions." Casa Chief Security Officer Jameson Lopp argued in a February blog post that BIP 110 would weaken two of Bitcoin's defining properties: censorship resistance and predictability.

DOG Mode does not require a hard fork or threaten a chain split. Instead, it relaxes relay restrictions and reduces dust limits while staying within Bitcoin's existing consensus rules. The client makes so-called four-megger transactions — those approaching the full 4MB block weight limit — relay-eligible by default, bypassing the standard relay pipeline that Bitcoin Core tightened in its v30 release. The $DOG Army previously executed what was described as the largest Bitcoin transaction by routing it directly to miners, bypassing the relay network entirely.

Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell previously warned on the bitcoin-dev mailing list that BIP 110 could invalidate legitimate pre-signed or time-locked transactions created before the fork. Developer Peter Todd raised four technical criticisms, including that the proposal ignores the high probability of a chain split and adopts a User Activated Soft Fork activation standard instead of the 95% miner threshold.

The emergence of a community-backed alternative client challenges Bitcoin Core's long-standing role as the de facto reference implementation. If significant portions of the network run different relay policies, it could create inconsistent transaction propagation — a two-tier relay network with unpredictable behavior for users. For the $DOG token specifically, wider access to block space could remove a meaningful bottleneck, potentially driving higher transaction volumes and trading activity around Runes-based tokens.

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