Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy, published a 110-point essay urging Bitcoin's users and miners to reject BIP-110, a proposal that would restrict how much arbitrary data can be written into the blockchain. The intervention lands weeks before the proposal's activation window opens, and it comes from the executive behind the largest corporate bitcoin holding in the world.
What is being proposed
BIP-110 is a temporary one-year soft fork that bundles seven restrictions on data-heavy transactions. A soft fork is a backward-compatible rule change: the new rules are stricter than the old ones, so nodes running older software still accept the resulting blocks as valid. That is the opposite of a hard fork, which requires everyone to upgrade or risk the network splitting in two.
The proposal was first published as BIP-444 in October 2025, after the Bitcoin Core v30 software release lifted default limits on OP_RETURN, the mechanism by which small amounts of non-financial data can be attached to a transaction. Supporters want to reverse that opening. Their argument is that Bitcoin's block space is a scarce shared resource that should be reserved for payments, and that using it as a general-purpose data store (the practice behind Ordinals inscriptions, which write images and text onto the chain) crowds out its monetary function.
Its most prominent backer is Luke Dashjr, chief technology officer at the mining pool Ocean, alongside the investor Fred Krueger.
Saylor's objection
Saylor's case is that consensus rules cannot be asked to judge why a transaction was made. His summary line: "Bitcoin does not need guardians of purity. It needs guardians of neutrality."
The underlying argument is about precedent. A rule that filters transactions by their apparent purpose establishes that the network is willing to make such judgments at all, and Saylor argues the proposal would "use consensus to narrow valid activity, constrain future options, complicate deployment, and establish a precedent it cannot later erase". He calls the remedy worse than the illness: "The proposed cure is more dangerous than the condition."
He raises two further objections that bear directly on the network's economics. Lowering the approval threshold to 55% is, in his view, too aggressive and risks a chain split. And squeezing out data transactions would reduce demand for block space, which means lower fees, a concern that matters because fee revenue is meant to replace the shrinking block subsidy as miners' long-term security incentive.
Notably, Saylor does not dispute that competition for block space is a real problem. He argues instead for fee markets, miner discretion, pruning and layer-two networks as ways to manage it without writing judgments into the protocol.
He is not alone. Adam Back, the Blockstream chief executive, has described the effort as a "quest to police other people".
The arithmetic is against it
Whatever the merits, BIP-110 is not close to activating. Mandatory signaling begins near block 961,632, expected around August 7, with rules taking effect around September 1 if it passes. Early lock-in requires 55% of blocks to signal support, well below Bitcoin's customary 95% bar.
Actual support sits at 0.86% of the current difficulty period, and has never exceeded roughly 1%. Jason Hughes, Ocean's vice-president of development and engineering, from the same pool whose CTO backs the proposal, put node support at 7% to 15% and said the measure is "on track to fail."
Why Saylor's own position is worth noting
Saylor is not a disinterested commentator. Strategy holds 843,775 BTC at an average cost of $75,476, as of July 12, making it the largest corporate holder of the asset.
That average cost is above the current market. CoinDesk put bitcoin at $64,598.09 on Sunday, roughly 14% below what Strategy paid on average, valuing the holding at about $54.31 billion. A company sitting on an unrealized loss of that size has an evident interest in avoiding anything that introduces uncertainty about the network, which is a reason to weigh his technical arguments on their merits rather than on his authority, in either direction.
