Bitcoin miners are overwhelmingly rejecting BIP-110, a controversial proposal designed to restrict non-financial data on the blockchain, with support hovering at just 0.31% of total hashrate as of late June. The proposal, which would cap transaction output data at 34 bytes and limit OP_RETURN usage to 83 bytes, needs 55% miner support to lock in early before its mandatory signaling phase begins between August 7 and August 15.

What Is BIP-110 and Why Do Miners Oppose It?

BIP-110 is a soft fork proposal originally introduced as BIP-444 in October 2025 and authored by Dathon Ohm. It was designed as a temporary, one-year consensus rule that would make it significantly harder to embed images, tokens, and other non-monetary content directly on Bitcoin's base layer. Proponents argue that protocols like Ordinals and Runes have driven up transaction fees and placed unnecessary strain on node operators.

However, the proposal has failed to gain traction among the mining pools that actually validate transactions and secure the network. Only Ocean, a small pool run by Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr, has signaled support since March 2026. No major mining pool has followed suit, despite months of advocacy from the proposal's supporters.

Why Are the Numbers So Bleak?

The support figures tell a stark story. The 0.31% hashrate figure translates to approximately 5 exahashes per second (EH/s) out of a total network hashrate of roughly 940 EH/s. Node support is similarly weak, sitting at 2-3% in early 2026, which represented about 583 out of approximately 24,481 nodes in January. Much of that node support came from Bitcoin Knots software rather than deliberate ideological alignment.

Bitcoin's upgrade mechanism requires overwhelming consensus to succeed. The gap between BIP-110's current support and the 55% threshold needed for early lock-in is enormous, making the proposal's failure all but certain before the August signaling deadline.

What Are the Key Concerns Holding Back Miners?

Critics of the proposal, including Blockstream CEO Adam Back and well-known Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp, have raised several technical and economic objections:

• Chain Split Risk: If enforcement of the new rules is inconsistent across the network, a contentious fork could split Bitcoin into competing versions.
• Reputational Damage: A failed or contentious fork attempt could harm Bitcoin's reputation as a stable, consensus-driven network.
• Enforcement Problem: Only nodes running the new rules would actually enforce the restrictions; miners and nodes that didn't upgrade would continue processing the transactions BIP-110 seeks to block.

The fundamental issue is economic: miners have strong financial incentives to process Ordinals, Runes, and similar protocols because these transactions generate fee revenue. Without overwhelming miner support, any restrictions would be unenforceable and easily circumvented.

How Does This Shape Bitcoin's Future?

BIP-110's near-certain failure carries significant implications for the Bitcoin ecosystem. The immediate takeaway for market participants is that Ordinals, Runes, and similar non-monetary protocols are not going anywhere. The economic incentives for miners to process these transactions remain intact, and the political will to restrict them does not exist at the hashrate level where it matters.

"Bitcoin's upgrade mechanism requires overwhelming consensus. BIP-110's failure to gain traction shows that even proposals with passionate grassroots support can stall completely if they don't align with miner economics," noted the analysis in the source material.

Editorial Team, Crypto Briefing

This outcome demonstrates a fundamental principle of Bitcoin governance: proposals that conflict with miners' economic interests face insurmountable obstacles, regardless of their technical merit or ideological support. The miners who secure the network through computational work ultimately have the final say on which rule changes proceed, and they have chosen to prioritize fee revenue over data restrictions.