Saylor and Adam Back Oppose BIP-110, Warn Bitcoin’s Biggest Risk Is Internal Protocol Tinkering

Michael Saylor and Adam Back — two of BBTC$63,974.00▼0.34%‘s loudest institutional bulls — have come out swinging against BIP-110, a proposed soft fork that would ban non-monetary data such as Ordinals and inscriptions from the Bitcoin blockchain. Their argument is blunt: the cure is worse than the disease, and the real threat to Bitcoin isn’t spam on-chain — it’s developers reaching into the protocol to settle a culture war.

BIP-110 would make it effectively impossible to attach images, text, and other arbitrary data to Bitcoin transactions — the mechanics that power Ordinals inscriptions. The proposal has already collapsed to under 1% of miners’ support, according to Yahoo Finance, which called the broader dispute “Bitcoin’s biggest governance fight in years.” Saylor has said Bitcoin has “no spam problem” and framed BIP-110 as a self-inflicted wound. Protocol tinkering, in his telling, is the network’s biggest risk — not the inscriptions it’s meant to stamp out, per BeInCrypto.

Back’s position is more technical. The cypherpunk veteran and Hashcash inventor took to X to write that BIP-110’s restrictions are “bypassable” — and argued that the real cost of the proposal isn’t spam prevention, it’s the innovation damage done to Bitcoin’s credibility as a neutral, permissionless base layer. Both figures, while critical of some Ordinals activity itself, fear a fork could do more harm than good to the network’s long-term standing, per CoinTelegraph via TradingView. The shared concern is governance precedent: once a soft fork is weaponized to exclude a class of use cases, the line between protocol stewardship and editorial control gets dangerously thin.

The Ordinals Backdrop

The backdrop matters here. Over the past two years, Ordinals exploded onto Bitcoin, drove a surge of fee revenue for miners, and then cooled as transaction activity declined. Inscriptions traffic has broadly fallen over that period, according to the CoinTelegraph source, which makes the timing of BIP-110 politically awkward — the loudest calls for a ban are arriving just as the activity being banned is fading on its own. There’s also a Bitcoin Knots vs. Bitcoin Core dimension to this fight, per the Bitcoin Well Podcast, with the Knots implementation historically far more hostile to non-monetary data.

Governance Stakes Ahead of Bitcoin 2026

The governance battle is splitting the Bitcoin community ahead of Bitcoin 2026, per BeInCrypto, and Saylor’s comments are widely read as targeting BIP-110 specifically, per BSCNews on X. The stakes are philosophical as much as technical. Bitcoin’s base layer is supposed to be credibly neutral — validating transactions without judging their content. A fork designed to police what people put in their own transactions cuts against that promise. Back’s “bypassable” point drives the practical weakness home: determined users route around restrictions anyway, while the fork itself locks in a precedent that future proposals can cite to justify the next round of content policing.

Market Context

The market context is muted. BTC is currently trading at $63,698, down 0.78% over 24 hours, with a market cap of $1.277 trillion and dominance at 56.3%. The broader crypto Fear & Greed Index sits at 26/100 — squarely in fear territory — meaning this governance drama is playing out against a backdrop of risk-off sentiment rather than the kind of euphoria that might amplify it into a price event.

Watch for whether any major mining pool or Core contributor breaks ranks to revive BIP-110’s prospects, and whether the Ordinals ecosystem — or a successor protocol — reignites on-chain data demand before Bitcoin 2026 forces the community into a very public corner.