The clock was ticking. With three weeks to go before the activation deadline, BIP-110 stood as the most aggressive attempt to surgically remove Ordinals from Bitcoin’s main chain. Yet the latest miner signaling data tells a story of near-total rejection: support has collapsed below 1%. This isn’t a close call—it’s a rout. The proposal, framed as a technical tweak to Bitcoin’s block size rules, was always a Trojan horse for a social crusade. And the miners just voted it into oblivion.
The Context: A War Fought Over Code
BIP-110—short for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110—is a technical document that alters the rules governing block size limits. But its real purpose, as revealed by months of behind-the-scenes lobbying, was to create a mechanism that could disable Ordinals inscriptions by tightening OP_RETURN and other opcode constraints. Ordinals, the protocol that allows users to embed arbitrary data (images, text, even entire files) onto individual satoshis, had exploded in popularity since early 2023. To its critics, it was an existential threat: spam clogging the mempool, driving up fees for ordinary transactions, and dragging Bitcoin into a regulatory gray zone over unregistered securities. To its defenders—including a vocal faction of miners and developers—Ordinals was simply a new use case, generating much-needed fee revenue in a world where block subsidies are halving every four years.
For three months, a coalition of Ordinals opponents had been canvassing mining pools, core developers, and influential community figures to rally support for BIP-110. They argued that Bitcoin’s security model depended on keeping the chain ‘clean’—focused solely on financial transactions. But the pitch hit a wall of resistance. Adam Back, the legendary cypherpunk and Blockstream CEO, publicly dismissed the proposal’s backers with a terse critique: ‘They don’t understand Bitcoin.’ His message was clear—altering consensus rules to police content violates the very ethos of permissionless innovation. By late February, the anti-Ordinals camp had lost momentum. The final blow came when miner support, never above 5% in the best weeks, cratered to less than 1% in the latest signaling window.
The Core: Miners as the Ultimate Veto
This is not a story about code; it’s a story about power. Bitcoin’s governance is often described as ‘rough consensus and running code,’ but that phrase obfuscates a brutal economic reality: miners hold the final say. Through BIP-9 signaling, each mining pool can set a bit in the block header to indicate support or opposition to a soft fork. When support falls below a critical threshold—typically 95% to activate—the proposal dies. BIP-110 never came close. The low signaling reflects not just apathy but active resistance. Miners, after all, are the ones who collect transaction fees from Ordinals inscriptions. For the largest pools—F2Pool, Antpool, Foundry—the decision was simple: why vote to kill a revenue stream? During December 2023, Ordinals-related fees accounted for over 30% of total transaction fees some days. That’s not noise; that’s profit.
Yet the rejection runs deeper than immediate economics. Ordinals has also galvanized a secondary ecosystem—Bitcoin Layer 2s, sidechains like Stacks, and decentralized exchanges that rely on asset issuance. A blanket ban would have dismantled that emerging infrastructure overnight, sending developers and capital fleeing to Ethereum or Solana. Miners, who are increasingly diversified into other ventures (hosting, energy trading, even lending), have little interest in cratering the ecosystem’s growth potential. By killing BIP-110, they have effectively sent a signal: Bitcoin is not a programmable ledger, but it will not be rolled back to a pure payments network either. The door for experimentation stays open—provided it pays.
The Contrarian Angle: The ‘Decoupling’ That Wasn’t
The conventional narrative in crypto media has been that Ordinals represents a fundamental rift between ‘purists’ (who want Bitcoin to remain digital gold) and ‘innovators’ (who see it as a settlement layer for digital assets). BIP-110 was framed as a test of which vision would win. But the contrarian view is that this episode actually demonstrates Bitcoin’s remarkable stability under stress. Far from a near-fork, the system absorbed a contentious proposal and rejected it without a chain split, without a price crash, without any lasting damage to network security. This is not a weakness—it’s a feature. Bitcoin’s governance is designed to be ossified, to make change excruciatingly difficult. The low miner support for BIP-110 confirms that the network resists arbitrary social engineering. In a world where Congress can change the tax code overnight, Bitcoin’s permafrost governance is a structural advantage.
Moreover, the defeat of BIP-110 removes a tail risk that was suppressing Ordinals-related assets. The market had already priced in a high probability of failure—Magic Eden’s BRC-20 NFT trading volumes had been sliding for weeks as traders feared a sudden protocol-level block. With the threat eliminated, we can expect a relief rally in blue-chip Ordinals like NodeMonkes or the BRC-20 ‘ordi’ token. But more importantly, the episode clarifies the regulatory landscape: self-censorship via protocol change is off the table. The only remaining avenue to suppress Ordinals would be social pressure on individual miners to censor transactions at the mempool level—a far less effective, and legally dubious, strategy. For now, Ordinals lives.
The Takeaway: What This Means for the Next Cycle
Smart money should be watching the next phase: infrastructure build-out. With the protocol-level ban shelved, developers can focus on scalability solutions for Bitcoin L2s—think BitVM-style rollups, lightning network improvements, and decentralized indexers. The 2025-2026 cycle may well be defined by Bitcoin’s emerging application layer, not just its store-of-value narrative. But don’t get euphoric. The same forces that defeated BIP-110 will fiercely resist any upgrade that threatens their fee income. 2017’s dream is today’s regulation—or in this case, 2024’s rejection. The real insight is that Bitcoin’s monetary premium now coexists with a fragile, permissioned application layer. The question for investors is not whether Ordinals survives, but whether its ecosystem can mature without triggering another governance crisis when the next fee spike hits.
