Bitcoin's BIP-110 Data Fight Nears an August Deadline With Almost No Miners Behind It

A long-running argument over what belongs inside a Bitcoin block is approaching a firm deadline. Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 (BIP-110), formally titled the Reduced Data Temporary Soft Fork, would impose a one-year cap at the consensus level on arbitrary data embedded in transactions. It targets the methods used for Ordinals inscriptions, large OP_RETURN payloads, and certain Taproot constructions repurposed for storage. New outputs would be capped at 34 bytes and OP_RETURN data at 83 bytes, according to Bitcoin.com News.

The mechanics are what make it contentious. The deployment uses a modified version of the standard signaling scheme. It requires only 55% of miner blocks in a retargeting period rather than the usual 95%, and it sets a mandatory signaling window at block 961,632, estimated for August 7, that would attempt to force compliance without majority miner support. As of late June, signaling stood at roughly 0.31% of hashrate, about 5 exahashes per second (a measure of computing power devoted to mining) out of a network near 940, with most signaling blocks produced by a single pool, GNcrypto reported.

CryptoSlate frames the coming weeks as a problem for infrastructure operators rather than traders. Exchanges, custodians, wallets, and node operators must decide which client software to run before the window opens, and whether to warn users about replay, deposit, and withdrawal risks if the network divides. Bitcoin developers including Adam Back and Jameson Lopp have called the activation parameters reckless and warned that they risk splitting the chain into two. Supporters describe the effort as a defense of Bitcoin's monetary purpose against what they call spam.

The episode is a test of how Bitcoin actually changes. An activation backed by only a minority of miners attempts to move consensus through node and user adoption rather than mining power, which is precisely the mechanism critics say invites a split. The outcome will show where authority over the protocol truly sits.