The clock is ticking on BIP-110, the proposal that would effectively ban Ordinals on Bitcoin. With just three weeks until the deadline, miner support has cratered below 1%, and Blockstream CEO Adam Back has publicly slammed the proposal's backers, saying they 'don't know Bitcoin.' The development all but seals the fate of the contentious soft fork, which has divided the community since its introduction.
Miner support evaporates
According to the latest signal data, miner support for BIP-110 has dropped below 1%. That's a dramatic fall from earlier this year, when the proposal briefly flirted with the activation threshold. The decline means that even if the remaining miners were to flip, it's almost impossible to reach the required 90% threshold before the deadline. The proposal's backers have not publicly conceded defeat, but the numbers speak for themselves.
Adam Back's blunt assessment
Blockstream CEO Adam Back, a longtime Bitcoin core developer and early contributor, didn't mince words. In a post on social media, he called BIP-110 supporters 'people who don't know Bitcoin.' Back has been a vocal critic of the proposal from the start, arguing that it would fundamentally alter Bitcoin's permissionless nature. His latest comments come as the proposal's window narrows, and they reflect a growing consensus among core developers that BIP-110 is dead on arrival.
What BIP-110 would have done
BIP-110 aimed to ban Ordinals — the protocol that allows users to inscribe data onto satoshis, effectively creating Bitcoin-based NFTs. Proponents argued that Ordinals were clogging the network and driving up fees. Opponents, including Back, countered that any attempt to censor transactions on Bitcoin violates the network's core ethos. The proposal would have required a soft fork to implement, meaning it needed overwhelming miner support to activate.
What happens next
With three weeks left, the proposal is effectively dead. The Bitcoin Improvement Process requires that a BIP reach the activation threshold within a set period, or it lapses. BIP-110's backers could try to reintroduce it later, but the collapse in miner support and the public rebuke from a figure like Adam Back make that unlikely. For now, Ordinals remain on Bitcoin, and the debate over their place in the ecosystem will continue — but not through this particular proposal.
