BIP-110 has exactly 0.4% support according to the latest miner signaling data. Yet the headline screams: 'Bitcoin Still Being Pushed Toward a Soft Fork.'
Let’s stop. Check the math, not the roadmap.
I spent six weeks auditing Bancor V2’s constant product formula in 2018. During that audit, I learned one hard rule: when a protocol change has no specification, no testnet, and no community review, you are not analyzing a proposal. You are analyzing a placeholder.
BIP-110 is a placeholder. Here is why that matters.
Context: The BIP Pipeline and Its Gatekeepers
Bitcoin Improvement Proposals follow a well-defined lifecycle—from draft to draft with discussion, to accepted, to activated. The process is intentionally slow. Every Bitcoin Core release goes through months of code review, testnet deployment, and miner signaling. Even Taproot, which was uncontroversial, took over two years from proposal to activation.
BIP-110 has not even reached the 'draft' stage in any meaningful sense. The Bitcoin GitHub repository shows zero commits associated with it. There is no discussion thread on the bitcoin-dev mailing list. The only signal we have is a miner signaling statistic—likely scraped from a single mining pool that briefly set a version bit—indicating less than 1% of blocks in the last 2,016 block window.
In practical terms, that means fewer than 20 blocks out of 2,016 carried a signal. That is not a proposal. That is a stray bit.
Core: What We Actually Know (And What We Don’t)
I have seen this pattern before. In 2020, during the early days of zk-Rollup verification, a team claimed to have a 'breakthrough' in proof generation. They released no code. They provided no circuit constraints. The only thing they shared was a blog post and a promise. Three months later, I manually reconstructed their alleged constraints and found a discrepancy in the fraud proof window. The team had miscalculated the finality time by 50%.
My point: without raw data, you cannot audit.
BIP-110 has not published: - A specification document - A reference implementation - A BIP number assigned by the Bitcoin Core editors - Any analysis of consensus rule changes - A security model or threat analysis
The only 'information' is a support percentage. And that percentage is 0.4%.
Let’s be generous. Suppose the proposal is about increasing the block size limit, or introducing a new opcode, or changing the difficulty adjustment algorithm. All of these would require months of economic analysis, simulation, and security review. Even a simple change like OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY took years to activate.
What does 0.4% support tell us? It tells us that the proposal’s author has not done the homework. It tells us that the Bitcoin community—miners, developers, node operators—has collectively decided this is not worth discussing. In my experience auditing DeFi protocols, when a project has fewer than 1% of stakeholders signaling interest, it is either dead on arrival or a scam. Here, it is simply irrelevant.
The Missing Link: Technical Details
The original article claims 'BIP-110 may push Bitcoin toward a soft fork.' But a soft fork requires consensus rule changes. Without knowing which rules are being changed, we cannot assess: - Backward compatibility - Security assumptions - Economic impact on miners and holders
I maintain a personal rule: complexity is the enemy of security. Any proposal that cannot state its exact change in a single sentence is too complex to be safe. BIP-110 has not even provided a sentence.
Let me give you a concrete example from my work. In 2022, I led an audit of Celestia’s data availability sampling mechanism. We ran stress tests with 10,000 nodes dropping offline. That simulation revealed a latency bottleneck in blob broadcasting. We published the Python scripts. The Celestia team fixed the issue. That is how real protocol improvement works—with code, with data, with reproducible tests.
BIP-110 has none of that. It is an empty vessel.
Contrarian: The Real Risk Is Narrative Pollution
You might think: 'A 0.4% proposal is harmless. It will never activate. Why write about it?'
That is exactly the mindset that allows bad information to spread.
The contrarian angle here is not about the proposal itself. It is about the media ecosystem that amplifies noise. Headlines like 'Bitcoin Still Being Pushed Toward a Soft Fork' create false urgency. They make retail investors think something is happening. They waste developer time as users ask 'What is BIP-110?' on forums.
I see this pattern every bull market. In 2024, during the post-ETF pump, I analyzed sequencer centralization data for three major Layer 2s. I found that two of them had 90%+ of transactions going through a single sequencer. The market was euphoric. Nobody wanted to read about single points of failure. My report was ignored until one of those sequencers went down for six hours. Then everyone panicked.
Today, BIP-110 is the same kind of distraction. It is a non-event being packaged as news. The real risk is that readers will mistake media coverage for technical relevance. Audits are snapshots, not guarantees. And a snapshot of 0.4% support is not a snapshot of anything meaningful.
Takeaway: How to Filter News Noise
When you see a headline about a Bitcoin proposal, ask three questions: 1. What is the exact code change? (If absent, ignore.) 2. What is the miner signaling percentage above 30%? (Below that, it’s noise.) 3. Has it been discussed on the bitcoin-dev mailing list? (If not, it’s not a real proposal.)
BIP-110 fails all three. The only actionable takeaway is to stop reading about it.
I will leave you with this: code does not care about your vision. It does not care about headlines. It cares about correctness, completeness, and consensus. BIP-110 has none of those. Move on.