Why Bitcoin’s BIP-110 refuses to die despite near-zero miner support

Dathon Ohm, the proposal’s pseudonymous author, declared, “Bitcoiners are about to show the world, once again, what happens when the plebs stand up against large, corrupt institutions who are telling us Bitcoin isn’t money and our nodes belong to them,” in a thread on X on Thursday.

Rhetoric aside, the thread gave instructions to miners planning on enforcing the BIP-110 rulebook, advising them to upgrade to Bitcoin Knots (the primary software carrying and enforcing BIP-110), warning that Bitcoin Core (the network’s principal software that represents the current implementation of Bitcoin’s rules) should not be run as it would become “insecure.”

BIP-110 is designed to temporarily tighten Bitcoin’s consensus rules to make inscription techniques used by Ordinals and Runes impractical. Its supports argue that use of the network for non-financial data consume block spacer, make it more expensive to run and undermine Bitcoin’s purpose of digital money.

Critics have pointed to the lack of miner support as evidence that the proposal is effectively dead. Its supporters reject that premise.

BIP-110’s proponents argue that miners do not govern Bitcoin – they merely produce the blocks. Nodes decide whether those blocks comply with rules. User-activates soft forks (UASFs) are designed around that principle, allowing node operators to begin enforcing new rules from a predetermined block height regardless of miner support.