Michael Saylor, co-founder and executive chairman of Strategy, published a 110-point essay on X on July 18 urging the Bitcoin network to reject BIP-110, the "anti-spam" soft fork proposal, in a rare foray into protocol governance.
The essay, titled "110 Reasons BIP 110 Is a Bad Idea," had drawn more than 840,000 views by Sunday afternoon. Saylor said he shares supporters' desire to protect Bitcoin but considers the proposed cure more dangerous than the condition it targets.
His central argument is that consensus rules cannot judge the purpose of valid, fee-paying transactions and should not try. Objectors can decline to use, relay, index or mine unwanted data, he wrote, and any consensus rule should address a demonstrated denial-of-service or validation risk rather than perceived intent. The essay's final entry dismissed the measure as "a Bitcoin Iatrogenic Proposal" — repurposing the BIP acronym with the medical term for harm caused by treatment — and closed: "Bitcoin does not need guardians of purity. It needs guardians of neutrality."
What BIP-110 Would Do
BIP-110 is a temporary, one-year soft fork bundling seven restrictions on data-heavy transactions. It was first published as BIP-444 in October 2025, after Bitcoin Core's v30 release lifted default limits on OP_RETURN data. A BIP-110-enabled client is based on Bitcoin Knots, the node software maintained by Ocean CTO Luke Dashjr, one of the proposal's most prominent backers.
Supporters frame the debate around incentives rather than neutrality, arguing that treating arbitrary data storage as a supported use distorts fee dynamics, burdens node operators and forces monetary transactions to compete with non-financial traffic. They describe the one-year restrictions as a temporary intervention meant to refocus the network on bitcoin's use as money.
An August Showdown With Thin Support
Under BIP-110's deployment schedule, a mandatory signaling period opens near block 961,632, expected around Aug. 7, when enforcing nodes begin rejecting blocks that fail to signal, with the rules taking effect for those nodes around Sept. 1.
Signaling blocks currently make up 0.86% of the difficulty period, far short of the 55% needed for early lock-in and never having exceeded roughly 1%, according to the proposal's public monitor. If support stayed near those levels, BIP-110 nodes would reject nearly all blocks from non-signaling miners during the mandatory window, risking a split onto a minority chain. Jason Hughes, Ocean's vice president of development and engineering, estimated node support at 7% to 15% in a guest post for Bitcoin Magazine, arguing the proposal is on track to fail.
Saylor first weighed in on July 11, replying to criticism of the proposal from Blockstream CEO Adam Back with a post arguing there are "110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam." Backers of the soft fork answered the essay in kind: investor Fred Krueger posted a mirror-image rebuttal listing 110 reasons in favor.
The intervention is unusual for Saylor, whose firm is the largest corporate holder of bitcoin (BTC) with 843,775 BTC at an average cost of $75,476, per its most recent SEC filing.