Bitcoin bulls Michael Saylor, Adam Back slam BIP-110 Ordinals proposal

Background

The ongoing debate comes despite a broad downturn in Ordinals transaction activity over the last two years.

Source: Michael Saylor

BIP-110 is one of the more notable protocol-level disputes in the Bitcoin development community since the Blocksize Wars between 2015 and 2017, when ecosystem participants debated whether it was worth risking a chain split to raise the block size limit for scalability.

BIP-110 was introduced by pseudonymous Bitcoin developer "Dathon Ohm" with the support of Ocean protocol founder Luke Dashjr.

Activation Requirements

BIP-110 won't be activated unless 55% of Bitcoin nodes validating blocks are in support of the proposal across a Bitcoin block "period." In the last period, period number 475 between block 955,584 and 957,599, only 1% of blocks were BIP-110-supportive.

Ordinals Activity Decline

The dispute comes at a time when Ordinals activity is at near all-time lows, with fewer than 10,000 Ordinals inscribed into the Bitcoin blockchain on a daily basis over the last month, down massively from the more than 400,000 seen during its peak in August 2023.

Change in daily Ordinals inscriptions since December 2022. Source: Dune Analytics

Critiques and Counterarguments

Meanwhile, Back offered a deeper critique of BIP-110, describing it as a "quest to police other people."

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He said Bitcoin's decentralization should mean "you can't impose your views on others," calling it incompatible with Bitcoin's cypherpunk ethos of permissionless, censorship-resistant money.

Dashjr and other BIP-110 proponents have called Ordinals-driven bloat a "serious threat" to the network, prompting the need for an imminent fix. They have also argued BIP-110 wouldn't cause a chain split, as many fear, while adding that the BIP-110 fork imposes a temporary one-year limit and thus wouldn't invalidate fee-paying transactions over the long term.

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