The Case Against BIP110
by Satonymous
2026-June-11 UTC
This is to state the case against BIP110, and to bring awareness to various identified vulnerabilities and flaws with the planned BIP110 chain.
There is an upcoming bitcoin fork known as BIP110 which takes place in August 2026. Although the miners signalling support for this is currently less than 1%, the supporters of BIP110 even if not the majority, are very outspoken online on their support for BIP110, much more so than those against BIP110. Support of BIP110 I am claiming mainly results from a lack of awareness of the truth, lack of adequate technical understanding of Bitcoin, and in believing fallacies as they are misled by well known influencers. For if people knew the truth and knowledgable, they would be against BIP110, which I am explaining here. I've been into Bitcoin from the very early days, and a long time cypherpunk, one cannot say that I am against Bitcoin's use for monetary purposes only, nor unknowledgeable about Bitcoin. I've seen this before and this feels very similar to the segwit battle and the resulting junk-coin which forked off of Bitcoin known as bcash. It is no coincidence that people with technical understanding of Bitcoin and technical competence are against BIP110. BIP110 support generally comes from people who are newer to Bitcoin or lack a technical understanding of Bitcoin.
The very short summary of this article is this. Being against BIP110 is not supporting spam. BIP110 does not fix anything as it claims to. BIP110 is a planned permanent hard-fork that will be incompatible with Bitcoin, instead of a temporary soft-fork as it claims to be. The BIP110 chain will have numerous flaws and vulnerabilities as detailed below. What I am saying here is not opinion but rather fact which can be verified.
A brief simplified explanation of BIP110, BIP110 is a set of new Bitcoin rules which define what transactions are and are not allowed. Its intent is to temporarily stop non-monetary spam transactions, and these restrictions are in place for one year after which the restrictions are lifted again. BIP110 would activate for nodes running BIP110 if at least 55% of mined Bitcoin blocks signal for BIP110 support, otherwise BIP110 nodes are hard-forking themselves in August 2026 regardless of miner support to create a new coin called BIP110-coin to compete with Bitcoin.
And now my case against BIP110 explained;
- Opposition to BIP110 is not supporting spam.
The majority of BIP110 critics are not pro-spam, and the debate of BIP110 vs. anti-BIP110 is not a matter of pro-spam vs. ani-spam. Rather, critics of BIP110 are against it because they realize it does not fix anything as it claims to, and that it is being poorly implemented. This is a case of the claimed cure being worse than the problem itself. BIP110 supporters use fallacies that appeal to emotion rather than logic, combined with falsely framing the BIP110 debate as being pro-spam vs. anti-spam instead of whether BIP110 itself is a good idea or not. Even if BIP110 were a good idea, its implementation is flawed. - BIP110 does not fix anything as it claims to.
Reason 1- BIP110 filters are only temporary. After a year of activation, BIP110-coin will be exactly like Bitcoin again for better or worse, except that BIP110-coin will be worth nothing or very little, and be incompatible with Bitcoin as a result of its own self-inflicted fork. Although the changes that BIP110 claims to do are temporary, the fork is permanent. This temporary implementation of the filters makes the permanent hard-fork pointless.
Reason 2- BIP110 does not actually stop spam. Someone already figured out how to spam a blockchain with images in a way that bypasses BIP110 filters. (source: knotslies DOT com) - BIP110 is a planned permanent hard-fork, not a temporary soft-fork. BIP110 promoters are misleading people.
- BIP110 will be incompatible with Bitcoin after the fork.
This will be problematic because when BIP110 users try to make Bitcoin payments, in their alternate reality they think they made a Bitcoin payment but they actually did not because they are on a different chain, they will end up losing their BIP110 coins. Likewise, if someone is using BIP110-coin and falsely saying they are accepting Bitcoin for payments, they will end up claiming that a sender did not send them payment when the sender actually did pay them (using Bitcoin). BIP110 users will have to choose to either keep using Bitcoin, or to use BIP110-coin due to the lack of replay protection. Without distinction between BIP110 chain and the Bitcoin chain being communicated by both the sender and recipient of a transaction, these described problems will come up. Bitcoin users will continue to call the non-BIP110 chain as Bitcoin, and so the only way forward is for BIP110 users to admit that BIP110 will be its own coin and to call it what it is, BIP110-coin. People who choose to use BIP110-coin will opt into a chain with no market cap, no value, and of no use as no known exchanges or businesses are planning on accepting BIP110-coin. BIP110-coin will also be incompatible with the current lightning network, and so BIP110-coin users would have to create their own new lightning network. - BIP110 being a temporary set of filters, demonstrates a lack of technical confidence and a lack of testing. It was made temporary because of lack of confidence in the effects it may have.
- BIP110 is a scam.
BIP110-coin and its supporters will falsely claim that their new coin is the real Bitcoin when it is not and will not be. This deception may even cause confusion to people and may cause people to be scammed out of their money by buying fake Bitcoin (BIP110-coin). BIP110-coin is a planned altcoin that is already trying to deceive people into thinking it is Bitcoin. - Core did not make any changes to Bitcoin to allow for spam.
Although this is unrelated to BIP110, I am mentioning this as an example of one of the many fallacies that many BIP110 supporters claim. Many BIP110 supporters think that maintainers of Core (Bitcoin's most popular node implementation) made new changes to the Bitcoin protocol rules to allow for spam. This is not true. There never was an OP_RETURN size limit for Bitcoin transactions, and Core did not remove the ability for nodes to set OP_RETURN size limits for transactions in their mempools. I'm not defending Core here, I'm just pointing out one of the many fallacies and misunderstandings that are used to get people to support BIP110. I personally do not support the removal of the default mempool policy limiting OP_RETURN though it still remains an option for nodes even if not the default. It is an error to say that Core removed the ability for nodes to control their mempool policy regarding OP_RETURN and that Core removed the OP_RETURN limit at the protocol level. But again, the scope of this article is not about Core vs. other implementations. Rather, it is about the flaws with the proposed solution known as BIP110. - BIP110-coin will be on a broken and vulnerable minority chain with 4 identified vulnerabilities and flaws with the BIP110 chain.
As of now, less than 1% of miners are signalling support for BIP110. In a few months BIP110 nodes will no longer acknowledge the majority of Bitcoin blocks and BIP110 nodes will only acknowledge BIP110 blocks. This means that BIP110 will become its own coin, BIP110-coin.
1: Because BIP110-coin has no planned abrupt difficulty adjustment, the difficulty requirement on BIP110-coin blocks will be significantly higher than the amount of hashrate on BIP110-coin. As a result, BIP110-coins blocks will take at least 16 hours on average to confirm assuming that BIP110-coin hard-forks with the current miner support of less than 1%. It will also take the BIP110-coin chain almost 4 years just to reach the difficulty adjustment period to bring the confirmation time of BIP110-coin transactions back down to 10 minutes. For nearly 4 years, BIP110-coin will take 16-17 hours just for one confirmation of a transaction if miner support does not increase.
2: Then if BIP110-coin eventually lasts long enough to reach the difficulty adjustment period without any increase of hashrate, it would be a significant (99%) drop in difficulty requirement making BIP110-coin vulnerable to 51% attacks, orphaned blocks, double spends, and transaction censorship.
Even if more miner support did eventually come over to BIP110, that would create other issues which I will proceed to explain,
3: BIP110 is already destined to be the minority chain compared to Bitcoin by its planned hard-fork with currently less than 1% of miner support. Even if BIP110-coin were to eventually gain more miner support, the longer time goes on after the fork, the harder and harder it becomes for it to ever become the longest chain due to a lack of immediate difficulty adjustment upon fork activation. The Bitcoin chain would grow faster than the BIP110 chain.
4: Even if the BIP110 chain were to implement an immediate difficulty adjustment upon fork activation, it would with certainty make itself permanently incompatible with the Bitcoin blockchain and never be able to become the longest blockchain due to mining and building on blocks below Bitcoin's difficulty requirement. The sudden drastic drop of BIP110 difficulty would also make it immediately vulnerable to 51% attacks sooner rather than delaying that vulnerability by almost 4 years.
There is no way for BIP110 to win without a majority of miner support pre-activation, and its planned hard-fork without majority consensus is its own self-inflicted suicide.
In summary, BIP110 does not actually fix anything, and even if BIP110 was a good idea, it is dead on arrival due to its flawed implementation. BIP110 supporters are failing to see these flaws and how they will be self-inflicting destruction upon themselves. BIP110 is irresponsible and misleading, and I fear many will fall victim to it. Many people who are not really tech-savvy are following the BIP110 promotion by influencers online without realizing the disastrous consequences that BIP110 will have on their funds and well-being.
Why do you think that the debate has been so plagued with people misunderstanding each other?
That's by design, both camps are funded by the same hidden hand, the one pushing for covenants
Both camps exist to be divided such that when their leaders get the unification signal there will be few unfactioned left to resist.
This is observable in how BIP-110 forces a wedge directly into the conservative faction of Bitcoin. By making BIP-110 a "User-Activated Soft Fork" (UASF), it forces purists to choose between aggressive protocol intervention or letting the chain bloat. The Result being the unified front against base-layer changes is broken.
Once the taboo of forcing a soft fork via minority signaling is normalized, the psychological barrier to activating covenants is completely gone. The precedent changes from never changing the base layer to changing it when the base layer when the crisis is big enough.
I feel dense, but whose is the hidden hand?
The lines between intelligence agencies and industry are blurry, same way that industries use regulation to protect against competition. The government is just a giant corporation where industry colludes.
If the large entities get their way and enable Bitcoin delegation, it gives leverage to their existing systems of control.
Think withdrawing your Bitcoin from an exchange, if they use covenants they can revoke your coin after you've withdrawn or make sure you don't send it to someone they don't like... Fake L2's getting acquired by the big banks... Stablecoins that trace back to your Bitcoin stack after you sell on a "DEX"... coordinators everywhere conducting surveillance...
The possibilities with covenants are endless, none of them good.
How so? I still supply the withdrawal address, which means I specify the locking script?
You think they won't let me withdraw unless I withdraw to a cucked address? Seems like no one would bother doing that. And it would just become a thing where if you buy on an exchange, you know you can't actually get the bitcoin, which means anyone who wants actual bitcoin won't buy on exchanges.
I don't see how the possibilities with covenants are so endless. Receiver's produce addresses, if the person won't send to my address, it's no different than a bcasher saying they can't send to my address.
Once the option is available it will become required, no exchange will be allowed to operate if they allow withdrawals to non-cucked outputs. Regulatory capture all over again.
You may not like it, but most will accept it graciously, under the guise of being protected from account hacks or scams. Non-covenant coins will become the exception, eventually you may not even be able to sell it for dollars in any meaningful amount. Sorry Scoresby Jr, no family vacation this year, Daddy has black market coins.
Larping with p2p exchanges can be fun if you're into frivolities, but that's not what moves the coin market.
It's exactly the same as colored coins and other anti-fungibility schemes Bitcoiners used to rail against when they weren't distracted by shit like BIP-110
Which is exactly why the vaults use-case for covenants is retarded, but that's a separate matter.
You paint a grim picture of things. I don't see it playing out this way. But perhaps it comes down to how big a market will the black market be. If it gets big enough, the point becomes moot. As much as governments love their authority, it's hard to keep tabs on billions of humans. Unless we build ourselves a nice cage.
In any case, Scoresby jr wil just have to go on vacation to the yakuza opium dens and calabrian wine cellars of the mafia.
It doesn't have to be this way, Bitcoiners could just stop being retarded for a minute and not bandwagon jump when some NGO soy-dev says they should support an OP_Code that will delegate their coins.