At block 961,633, the chain went silent. I have watched many forks die over the years—some in a blaze of trading bots and Telegram hype, others in the quiet surrender of a feature nobody asked for. But this one was special. BIP-110, a proposed user-activated soft fork that would have purged Ordinals and other non-financial inscriptions from Bitcoin's block space, lived for exactly two blocks. Eight hours. Maybe less, if you count the time between the first block and the second. It failed not because its code was flawed, not because of a 51% attack, but because the people with the machines to mine it simply did not show up. The hashrate never came. The fork starved to death in front of the entire industry, and the main chain did not even skip a beat.
This is the story of a proposal that tried to bend Bitcoin to a particular ideological vision and discovered that Bitcoin cannot be bent—not by code, not by rhetoric, and not by a handful of self-appointed guardians. It is also a story about what Bitcoin governance really is, how economic reality overrides ideological purity, and why the word "failure" might just be the most optimistic outcome we could have hoped for.
To understand what happened, we need to step back into the context that gave birth to BIP-110. For the past several years, Bitcoin's block space has become a canvas for a strange new art form. Ordinals, introduced in early 2023, allowed users to inscribe arbitrary data onto individual satoshis—text, images, even entire programs. BRC-20 tokens followed, creating a virtual zoo of meme coins and experimental assets living directly on the base layer. To some, this was a beautiful expression of permissionless innovation. To others, it was a desecration. A visible faction of Bitcoin maximalists, who view the chain as sacred 'digital gold' and nothing more, began calling for action. They saw inscriptions not as progress but as spam, as rent extraction, as a degradation of the monetary network's primary purpose.
BIP-110 was their answer. The proposal would have introduced a rule forcing nodes to reject blocks that contained non-financial data—effectively banning Ordinals and BRC-20 transactions at the consensus layer. It was not a soft fork designed to improve scalability or privacy; it was a weapon of ideological purification. And crucially, it was not activated through the standard BIP-9 miner signaling process, where miners vote by embedding bits in their blocks. Instead, it was pushed forward as a user-activated soft fork, or UASF, reminiscent of the contentious SegWit activation battle in 2017. The idea was simple: node operators would unilaterally enforce the new rules at a certain block height, refusing to accept blocks that did not contain the BIP-110 signal. Miners would then be forced to choose between adopting the new rules or being orphaned by those nodes.
On paper, a UASF is a grassroots check on mining power. In practice, it only works when there is overwhelming community consensus, enough that miners feel they will lose more by ignoring it than by adopting it. SegWit's UASF had that consensus; it succeeded. BIP-110 did not. The previous difficulty period had seen just 51 out of 2,016 blocks carry the signal—2.53% support, far below even the proposal's own unusually low activation threshold of 55%. Yet the enforcing nodes pressed ahead anyway, flipping the switch at height 961,632 and creating a parallel chain where their new rules would govern.
What unfolded next was less a battle than a wake. For eight hours, the BIP-110 chain awaited its miners. It produced two blocks, then nothing. Two blocks in 480 minutes, when the network's average block time would have predicted around 48. That gives us a rough upper bound of 4% hashrate participation—and realistically far less, since even a single small pool or a few solo miners could have temporarily mined those two blocks and then stopped. The chain was left with a security model that was not merely fragile; it was effectively absent. Reorg attacks, double spends, malicious inflation—all were technically trivial against a chain with 0.04% of Bitcoin's hashpower. The main chain, meanwhile, cruised past 961,681 without a backward glance. The market did not panic. No major exchange rushed to list a BIP-110 coin. There was no dramatic capitulation, just the quiet demographic inevitability of a proposal that had no economic constituency.
I have spent the last seven years building educational bridges between blockchain technology and everyday users—first with ChainBridge in Chengdu, then through my crypto education platform. In my audits and workshops, I have seen code that worked perfectly but failed spectacularly. Time and again, I teach my students the same first principle: code is law, but humans are the protocol. The BIP-110 story is a masterclass in that principle. The proposal's technical design was coherent. It had clear rules, a defined activation scheme, and a plausible mechanism for enforcement. It failed not because a developer made a cryptographic error, but because the human and economic ecosystem that gives Bitcoin its meaning chose not to participate. The code was, in a sense, beautiful; the governance was a corpse.
The Technical Anatomy of a Self-Inflicted Wound
Let us dig a little deeper into the mechanics, because understanding why BIP-110 died requires understanding how Bitcoin nodes and miners interact at the consensus boundary. A soft fork, technically, is backward-compatible: old nodes accept new blocks, but new nodes reject old blocks. In this case, nodes upgraded to BIP-110 would reject any block that did not signal support, even if those blocks were perfectly valid under the original consensus rules. The fork triggered at block 961,632, when the new nodes refused to accept the next block from the main chain. At that moment, there were two versions of the truth: main-chain miners continuing to build on the old rules, and BIP-110 nodes refusing to recognize their work. But a chain is not a chain if no one mines it. The BIP-110 nodes were like a judge declaring a new constitution, only to find no police force to enforce it. Miners, after all, do not choose rules out of civic duty; they choose the rules that maximize their expected revenue. And BIP-110 was, by construction, an attack on miner revenue.
Let me quantify that. Since the advent of Ordinals, inscription-related transactions have contributed meaningful fee income to miners. During periods of high inscription activity, these fees have sometimes represented 20% to 40% of total block rewards—especially after the April 2024 halving halved the base subsidy. For a mining operation with razor-thin margins and heavy electricity bills, a 30% revenue stream is not a rounding error; it is survival. A ban on non-financial data would compress that stream aggressively, likely reducing it to near zero in the short term. Was it any surprise that miners, who hold the physical means of block production, voted with their silence? They did not have to organize a public campaign or issue a statement. They simply continued mining the main chain. Their veto was not a vote; it was an absence. This is the core of Bitcoin governance that many outside observers fail to appreciate. The final arbiter is not a blockchain, not a judge, not a constitution. It is the mundane economic calculation of the people who operate the world's most powerful computing network.
Some might argue that BIP-110's low support was a sign of poor marketing rather than poor economics. But I would push back. The proposal's supporters seem to have believed that code could override incentive structures. They attempted a forced activation without building the necessary coalition: no major mining pools were on board, no prominent exchanges had committed to listing the fork chain, no large user base declared it would only use the new rules. In 2017, SegWit's UASF gained traction because it had a genuine grassroots movement and because miners saw the writing on the wall after months of deadlock. BIP-110 had none of that. It was an ideology in search of a constituency, and in eight hours it found exactly how many people that ideology commanded: two blocks' worth.
The Economic Veto: Miners as Stakeholders
If you want to understand any Bitcoin development controversy, follow the fees. I have said this in my lectures, and BIP-110 offers a perfect case study. To understand why miners rejected the proposal, we must look at the broader economics of block space. Bitcoin's block space is a scarce resource: roughly 4 MB of weight every ten minutes, shared among all transactions. For most of Bitcoin's life, demand for that space was driven by financial transfers, and fees were a secondary reward. Then Ordinals changed the game. They turned Bitcoin into a database, a proof-of-existence service, an art gallery, and a token issuance platform—all at once. This may have diluted the 'digital gold' narrative, but it created real economic value for one crucial group: miners. The fees from inscriptions filled a gap in the security budget that many analysts had worried about since the block subsidy began its long decay. Instead of relying solely on rising prices to maintain security, miners could now earn from blockspace utilization.
BIP-110 was not a neutral rule tweak. It was a transfer of value away from miners and toward a particular vision of what Bitcoin should be. The proposal's backers might have seen it as purification, but miners saw it as a pay cut. And in a system where the network's security is fundamentally based on miners' expectation of future reward, a pay cut is not merely an inconvenience—it is an existential threat to the security model. If miners were to switch to a chain that bans the very applications paying their electricity bills, their expected profit would decline, they would eventually have to shut down machines, and the entire network's hash rate would drop. That would make Bitcoin less secure and more vulnerable to attacks. In other words, even if BIP-110 had succeeded in purifying the chain's blocks, it might have done so at the cost of the chain's security budget. The miners, in their shortsighted economic rationality, protected their own income, and in doing so, they inadvertently protected the network's overall security.
A friend of mine who runs a medium-sized mining facility in Sichuan put it to me simply: 'You can tell me about the whitepaper vision, but at the end of the day, I need to pay the hydro bill.' This is not greed; this is physics. The cost of electricity is real, the hardware is real, and the competitive pressure is real. Bitcoin does not run on altruism; it runs on aligned incentives. BIP-110 ignored that alignment, and it collapsed. We built trust in the chaos, not despite it—and that trust includes the trust between miners and the users who fill their blocks with data. When a proposal tries to unilaterally sever that relationship, the ecosystem has a way of pushing back. In this case, the pushback came without a single tweet, without a single meeting. It came through the silent, steady rhythm of main-chain blocks.
Market Silence, Ecosystem Relief
What about the market? The expected fireworks never went off. Bitcoin's price barely moved. Why? Because the digital asset market, for all its immaturity, recognized that the main chain was not under threat. The price of BTC is driven by ETF flows, macro liquidity, and the global regulatory outlook—not by a poorly supported fork that died in a day. The real impact was on the Ordinals ecosystem. For those building inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, and the infrastructure around them, BIP-110 was a sword hanging over their heads. If it had succeeded, their entire asset class would have become technically impossible on Bitcoin. The failure of the fork removes that specific existential threat, at least for the foreseeable future. I saw muted optimism in the Ordinals communities I monitor; nothing euphoric, just relief. The overhang of protocol-level censorship lifted, and builders could return to the more mundane challenges of user experience and liquidity.
However, I want to add a cautionary note. The market's short-term relief does not mean the conflict is over. It means the first battle ended in a stalemate. The ideological fault line remains, and the underlying question—what is Bitcoin block space for?—has not been answered. BIP-110 was one proposed answer, and it has been rejected. But the rejection was not a referendum on Ordinals; it was a referendum on a specific, aggressive activation strategy. A future proposal with better miner coordination, a more generous grandfathering clause, or a different economic design could still try to curb non-financial data. I advise the Ordinals community not to celebrate too loudly. Treat this as a reprieve, not a victory.
There is also a practical risk that I worry about as an educator: the risk of users being lured by 'fork BTC' from the BIP-110 chain. Some exchanges in the past have listed split coins during major forks, creating confusion and value for traders. In this case, the BIP-110 fork has essentially no hashpower, no liquidity, and no momentum. Any exchange that lists a token from that chain is exposing users to an almost certain 100% loss. If you see 'BIP-110 BTC' or any airdrop claiming to be the 'true Bitcoin' because it's 'clean,' remember that the clean chain has two blocks and zero defenders. Trust is earned in drops, lost in buckets. Do not trade a coin whose security depends on a few enthusiast nodes.
Governance: The Silent Hashrate Veto
Perhaps the most important lesson from BIP-110 lies in governance. Bitcoin is often called a democracy, but it is not. It is better described as a rotating oligarchy with three estates: developers, miners, and users. Proposals originate with developers, miners signal their consent through hashpower, and users signal theirs through economic adoption and node operation. No single estate can reform the protocol without the others. BIP-110 attempted to elevate the node operators' estate to absolute power. It treated the UASF mechanism as a royal decree, as if the consent of a few thousand relay nodes could overwrite the physical reality of mining. The result was a hard check on that hubris.
Miners possess a special kind of veto: the veto of inaction. They do not need to attack the new chain or rage against it. They can simply ignore it. And by ignoring BIP-110, they determined its fate. This is a feature, not a bug. I often tell my students that Bitcoin's governance is slow because it is safe. The requirement of supermajority consensus—whether through BIP-9 signaling or overt community backing—ensures that no minority faction can hijack the network. BIP-110's failure shows that safety net working exactly as intended. It also shows why previous successful forks, like Bitcoin Cash in 2017, were fundamentally different. Bitcoin Cash had a dedicated community, the support of major exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken, and a substantial minority of miners (at least 5-10%) who were willing to mine it persistently. It survived not because it triumphed in a culture war but because it had an economic base. BIP-110 had none. The absence of that base was not a temporary condition; it was a structural one.
One of the broader governance implications is the likely chilling effect on future 'purge' proposals. Who wants to invest months of code and discussion into a concept that will be dead within eight hours? The BIP-110 supporters lost not only the fork but also their credibility. Future proposals that attempt to force major changes with minimal support will be met with greater skepticism, not less. This is healthy. The cost of a failed fork is now visible: two lonely blocks, a silent chain, and a reputation in tatters. That is a powerful deterrent.
But let me also say something for the BIP-110 side, because I believe in intellectual honesty. The proposal may have failed, but the anxiety that motivated it is real. The base layer's endless appetite for data is not necessarily a good thing for Bitcoin. If every block becomes a battle for scarce space between financial settlement and meme inscriptions, ordinary users may priced out. Fees could spike unpredictably. The network could become congested to the point where it functions poorly as a monetary settlement system. These are serious problems. Ordinals are not merely a philosophical annoyance; they have real effects on the fee market. In the months following the protocol's launch, thousands of users experienced delayed transactions and rising costs. So while I do not endorse BIP-110's execution, I respect the underlying concern. The challenge now is to find a solution that is not a bloody knife.
Regulatory Twists: The Failed Purge's Side Effects
There is a regulatory dimension to this story that many people miss. Consider: if BIP-110 had succeeded, it would have effectively erased Ordinals and BRC-20 assets from Bitcoin's technical reality. That would have removed a whole class of digital assets that regulators like the SEC have been struggling to classify. If the asset cannot exist, there is no need to regulate it. Thus, BIP-110 could be read, somewhat paradoxically, as a form of chain-level self-censorship in response to regulatory pressure. Its failure means that regulators must continue to grapple with inscription-based assets living on the world's most decentralized network. This is not necessarily a bad thing—decentralization thrives in ambiguity—but it is a complication. The legal gray zone around these assets will persist, and the burden of compliance will fall on exchanges and market makers who choose to support them.
A failed purge also opens a window for opportunistic regulation. When a faction within the Bitcoin community tries and fails to ban a category of assets, external regulators may step in where internal governance could not. 'If the network can't police itself,' they might argue, 'then we will.' This is a real risk, and it is a risk that BIP-110's supporters did not adequately weigh. They saw themselves as defenders of Bitcoin's purity, but their actions may have inadvertently strengthened the broader movement toward surveillance and control. In my own work, I have always argued that education is the antidote to exploitation. The best way to avoid external regulation is not to unilaterally restrict what people can do with open infrastructure, but to teach them how to use it responsibly—and to build tools that make parasitic or harmful uses less attractive without requiring censorship of all novel uses.
Risk Management: How to Read This Event Safely
For the average Bitcoin holder or trader, what does BIP-110 mean in practice? Very little, and that is exactly what you want. Do not chase the fork. Do not worry about the security of your BTC; your coins on the main chain are as safe as they were the day before. The event barely registers on the price chart, and it should not. The real risks are operational: be careful with node software. If you are a node operator and you accidentally download a BIP-110 client, you will be disconnected from the main chain and could begin serving blocks from a nearly empty chain. That could disrupt wallet balances and transactions if you rely on your own node for validation. Always install software from trusted sources and verify release signatures. If you are an exchange or a custodian, you have a responsibility to the users who trust you with their funds. The moment a fork chain emerges, the worst thing you can do is list its coin without rigorous due diligence. The BIP-110 chain has no hashrate, no community, and no future. A listing would be a disservice to your customers and an invitation for a lawsuit.
Another risk category is the long-term narrative. Every failed fork leaves a smell. This one leaves a subtle stench, not of decay, but of resentment. The advocates of purifying Bitcoin will not abandon their cause; they will channel their frustration into new proposals, new opinion pieces, and perhaps new attempts to influence mining pools. The smart observer will watch not for dramatic forks but for quieter changes: a shift in how major mining pools advertise themselves, a growing willingness of pools to selectively exclude certain transactions, or a push for off-chain changes that achieve what BIP-110 could not. I have a moderate confidence in this prediction, and I share it not to spread fear but to suggest that vigilance is more valuable than complacency. Hold through the noise, build through the silence.
Contrarian Angle: The Miners' Short-Sighted Victory
Now let me play devil's advocate with myself. It is tempting to celebrate BIP-110's failure as a triumph of network resilience. But I want to push back on the comfortable narrative. Yes, the miners vetoed the change. Yes, the market shrugged. But the miners' veto was based on short-term revenue, not on a thoughtful analysis of Bitcoin's long-term security. By defending Ordinals, miners are defending a fee source that is volatile, speculative, and potentially transient. If the Ordinals speculative craze fades, as so many on-chain projects have faded, miners will be left with the same security budget gap they faced before—but now with an additional dependency on an unreliable revenue stream that their own economic choices have legitimized.
Worse, the success of Ordinals in capturing block space might be creating a tragedy of the commons. Each miner benefits from the fees inscriptions bring, but collectively, block space crowded with arbitrary data degrades the base layer's ability to serve high-value financial settlement. This is not a problem for today, but it could be a problem for a future where Bitcoin must compete with faster, cheaper, more flexible settlement networks. The base layer's unique value proposition is security and certainty, not cheap storage. Allowing it to become a mass-market disaster for storage and tokens could erode that value. The BIP-110 supporters were crude in their approach, but their underlying question deserves a better answer than 'miners want fees.' What is the right balance between block space as a public utility and block space as a monetarily pure vehicle? I do not have a perfect answer. But I do know that we will need to answer it with more sophistication than an eight-hour fork.
I also want to challenge the idea that the failure of BIP-110 proves that Bitcoin is immune to capture by a vocal minority. It proves only that this particular minority did not have enough economic weight. Majorities in Bitcoin are not permanent. If a future faction of extremely wealthy actors—say, state-level entities or institutional OTC desks—decides to support a similar purge with substantial mining capital, the outcome could be very different. The same mechanism that protected Bitcoin today might be used to centralize it tomorrow. We should not mistake resilience in one incident for permanent invulnerability. That is the blind spot of any evolutionary system: it defends against the last invasion, not the next one.
The Takeaway: A Lesson in Teaching and Building
So where do we go from here? The BIP-110 fork died in eight hours, but the ideas that birthed it will not die. The tension between Bitcoin the monetary network and Bitcoin the data network will keep shaping protocol debates for years. As educators, my team and I have a responsibility to keep that debate honest. We cannot let the failure of this fork silence the question of what Bitcoin should become. We also cannot let the temporary victory of the Ordinals crowd blur the fact that their success depends on an empty base layer that remains accessible to everyone. The future belongs to those who teach together—those who can explain both the power of permissionless innovation and the need for sustainable economic incentives.
For me, the two lonely blocks left by BIP-110 are a gift to the community. They are a freeze-frame of a moment when Bitcoin said 'no' without violence, without malicious attacks, without a contentious hard fork. The system absorbed the stressor and continued. That is not failure; that is function. The next time someone tells you that a few nodes can unilaterally remake Bitcoin, point them to the two-block high-water mark. Then ask them if they want to be as historically irrelevant as a chain that nobody mines. The only lasting reform in Bitcoin is the reform that aligns with the economic consensus of the people who secure it. Code is law, but humans are the protocol—and this week, humans chose to keep building in the noise, holding through the silence.
