Bitcoin’s BIP-110: A Fork in the Road or a Dead End?

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Jameson Lopp, with the dramatic flair of a man who has clearly never owned a cat, has thrown himself into the fray against BIP-110, declaring it a potential harbinger of chaos for Bitcoin’s blockchain. In a missive dated Feb. 23, he paints the proposal as a tempest in a teacup-a consensus-layer sword aimed at a policy dispute over transaction “spam,” with the collateral damage likely to include more than a few bruised egos and fractured blocks.

BIP-110, that darling of Luke Dashjr, promises to corral stray data in transactions with the precision of a poet and the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Lopp, ever the skeptic, dismisses it as a seven-lock door on a house built on sand. He calls it “reckless and doomed to fail,” not for its technical merits (which he admits are “neat, if slightly unhinged”) but for the way it threatens to turn Bitcoin’s governance into a game of Russian roulette with the network itself.

Why Lopp Thinks The Activation Path Is Dangerous For Bitcoin

The crux of Lopp’s lament lies not in the proposal itself, but in its activation strategy. He likens the 55% miner-signaling threshold to handing a loaded gun to a toddler and asking it to judge a beauty contest. The risk, he argues, is that Bitcoin could split into two chains faster than you can say “blockchain,” leaving everyone scrambling to pick up the pieces-metaphorically and literally.

He also takes aim at the proposal’s zero-tolerance stance for non-compliant blocks, which he compares to hosting a dinner party where the host throws out uninvited guests and their coats. This, he insists, raises the stakes of coordination risk to levels best left to professional poker players, not decentralized networks.

Lopp’s most cutting critique lands on the mandatory activation date of block height 961,632. He describes it as “dogmatic bullying,” a phrase that would make a 19th-century tsar blush. “This is not a neutral, low-drama deployment posture,” he writes, with the gravitas of a man who has clearly never attempted to coordinate a group project. “It’s a masterclass in how not to host a dinner party.” He ties this to a broader warning: even if UASF tactics are morally defensible, the design of BIP-110 ensures a chaotic finale if miners, exchanges, and wallets don’t sing from the same hymnbook.

He also swats down comparisons to the 2017 SegWit saga, noting that history’s favorite “almost-catastrophe” never actually had to play out. “You cannot pretend it’s low-risk,” he quips, “just because you’re wearing a SegWit t-shirt.” This, he argues, is the difference between a real crisis and a dress rehearsal for one.

In a section that reads like a detective novel’s red herring, Lopp dissects the claim that BIP-110 has grassroots support. He points out that 20% of nodes running Knots is less a mandate and more a “cost-effective hobby,” especially when Tor addresses can be conjured up like magic tricks. He publishes a breakdown of reachable nodes, noting that the ratio of Tor to IPv4 addresses among BIP-110 supporters is “as suspicious as a baker who claims to use only organic flour and moonlighting as a black-market arms dealer.”

On mining support, Lopp delivers a punchline worthy of a satirical novel. At the time of writing, miner signaling was “precisely zero,” and F2Pool’s public opposition “reads like a love letter to chaos.” He argues that miners, ever the pragmatists, have little incentive to back a proposal that might shrink their fee revenue-unless they’ve finally mastered the art of alchemy.

Ultimately, Lopp’s post is less a technical treatise and more a cautionary tale wrapped in a velvet glove. The real danger, he suggests, isn’t whether BIP-110 activates, but what it reveals about Bitcoin’s descent into a soap opera of neutrality, censorship resistance, and block-space politics. Even a failed fork, he warns, could leave the ecosystem “bruised, confused, and with a very expensive coffee table.”

At press time, Bitcoin traded at $62,791.

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2026-02-25 09:12