Bitcoin's BIP-110 Advances Toward Activation Despite Near-Zero Miner Backing

BIP-110, a proposal that would temporarily restrict large amounts of non-financial data, such as Ordinals inscriptions and Runes-protocol entries, from being written into Bitcoin's block space, is proceeding toward activation despite almost no support from miners. As CoinDesk detailed, signaling among mining pools has never risen above roughly 1 percent of hashpower and currently sits near zero, yet the proposal keeps moving toward its activation block because it does not rely on miners at all.

The mechanism that makes this possible is a UASF, which shifts power to enforce a rule change from miners, who traditionally signal support through the blocks they produce, to the operators of full nodes, who choose which software rules to follow. Node operators can adopt BIP-110's restrictions and simply reject blocks that violate them, regardless of whether the miners who produced those blocks agree with the rule. Bitcoin Magazine laid out three possible outcomes: the proposal fails to gain enough node adoption and is abandoned, it succeeds and becomes the enforced rule across the network, or adoption splits unevenly enough that Bitcoin temporarily forks into two chains, one that enforces the new data limit and one that does not.

The dispute matters for more than the fate of Ordinals-style inscriptions. Mining pools earn transaction fees regardless of what the transaction contains, and inscription-heavy transactions have become a meaningful source of fee revenue during periods of low ordinary transaction demand. That gives miners a financial reason to stay indifferent or hostile to a rule that would shrink that revenue stream, even if a vocal segment of node operators and users wants the restriction enforced. A UASF that lacks backing from the miners who hold most of the network's economic weight, sometimes called the "economic majority," risks producing a rule that node operators enforce in principle but that never commands the liquidity, exchange support, or hashpower needed to function as the dominant chain.