Michael Saylor Publishes 110-Point Essay Opposing Bitcoin's BIP-110 Soft Fork

Michael Saylor has escalated his opposition to a contentious Bitcoin proposal, publishing a sweeping 110-point essay over the weekend arguing that BIP-110—a soft fork meant to curb non-financial data on the network—would cause more harm than the problem it targets.

Titled "110 Reasons BIP 110 Is a Bad Idea," the Strategy executive chairman billed the text as a “case for neutral rules, hard consensus, open markets, and permissionless innovation." Saylor said he shares supporters' goals—keeping validation cheap, payments affordable, and Bitcoin focused on sound money—but rejects their remedy.

BIP-110 would, for around a year, tighten Bitcoin's consensus rules to limit the techniques used to embed arbitrary data, targeting the inscriptions and Ordinals that have crowded block space and pushed up fees since 2023. Supporters, including developer Luke Dashjr and the Bitcoin Knots camp, cast it as a way to fight spam, while critics say it would reject valid transactions and could split the network.

Kill or cure?

Saylor's essay builds on his earlier argument that the danger lies in the precedent that BIP-110 would establish. Bitcoin "cannot read intent," he wrote—the network can't tell whether bytes represent an image, a proof, a contract, or a future application—so restricting the forms used to store data also blocks legitimate ones. "'Spam' is not a consensus primitive," he argued, and disapproval of a use "is not invalidity."

Changing consensus to police one contested use, he warned, creates a template others could reuse, with privacy tools, novel custody, stablecoin settlement or token systems potentially facing “similar arguments.” That, he wrote, is "not a prediction" but "a governance risk." The restrictions would lapse after about a year, "but the precedent does not." He brands BIP-110 a "Bitcoin Iatrogenic Proposal"—one where the treatment itself does the damage.

Saylor also objects to the activation design, which lowers the miner-signaling threshold to 55% from the 95% used in earlier soft forks and drops the usual option to let a proposal quietly expire. Signaling has been running below 1%, far short of that 55% bar, according to the proposal's monitoring dashboard, and Saylor cautioned that mismatched enforcement "can divide the network."

“Guardians of neutrality”

Saylor cast the dispute as a fight over Bitcoin's character. "Bitcoin's strength is not that everyone agrees on every use," he wrote, arguing that it lies in the fact that "disagreement is contained by neutral rules and hard consensus." He concluded that, "Bitcoin does not need guardians of purity. It needs guardians of neutrality."

The Strategy chairman’s stance aligns him with Blockstream CEO Adam Back, Casa's Jameson Lopp and Bitcoin advocate Samson Mow, who have also pushed back on BIP-110, against Dashjr and the Knots camp. BIP-110's mandatory signaling window opens in August, with activation targeted around September 1.

The manifesto lands as Saylor’s Bitcoin treasury firm pivots from its “never sell” stance to “active capital management,” pausing its Bitcoin purchases as it builds up its cash reserve to $3 billion in order to fulfil stock dividend payments and debt interest obligations. Last week, Strategy CEO Phong Le said last week the firm wouldn't worry about its debt unless Bitcoin crashed to the $8,000–$10,000 range.