Adam Back Criticizes BIP-110 and Its Supporters Again

Blockstream CEO Adam Back has once again criticized Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 (BIP-110), stating that attempts to impose new rules on the network are rejected by the market. In a post on X on November 3, he referred to a comment by Bitcoin advocate Francis Pouliot, calling it a "masterclass in Bitcoin reality": "Attempts to impose one's views on Bitcoin are rejected by the market." In a separate post, Back noted that the debate is not just about data: "It's not necessarily about the payload." According to him, BIP-110 "failed the first check" due to technical issues.

What BIP-110 proposed

The formal name is the Temporary Soft Fork for Data Reduction, authored by developer Dayton Om. The document proposed limiting arbitrary data in transactions for about a year: standard output scripts to 34 bytes, OP_RETURN to 83 bytes, individual fields to 256 bytes, plus Taproot restrictions. Supporters, including developer Luke Dashjr (Bitcoin Knots, OCEAN pool), spoke of the unnecessary load on nodes. Opponents argued that rejecting transactions based on consensus rules would undermine Bitcoin's neutrality. The proposal's status is now closed.

Activation failure

A 55% miner signaling was required, but only 2.53% of blocks supported it during the necessary period. On August 8, nodes implementing BIP-110 rejected a mainnet block and created a separate chain. The minority branch produced two blocks and fell behind; a change to the BLAKE2b algorithm was discussed.

What about the nodes

According to bitdis org on November 3, out of 18,870 observed nodes, eight apply BIP-110 – about 0.04%. During the current difficulty period, none of the 649 blocks signaled support. About 90% of nodes run on Bitcoin Core, about 10% on Bitcoin Knots; running Knots does not imply support for BIP-110.

In July, Back's criticism was supported by Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor: both doubted that the restrictions on individual transactions justified a change in consensus. In a 2023 note, which Back referenced again, he called contentious forks recurring challenges to the network's immutability and added: "Time is a flat circle."