On July 19, 2025, Michael Saylor—MicroStrategy founder and the world’s most vocal Bitcoin bull—dropped a 9,000-word manifesto: '110 Reasons BIP 110 Is a Bad Idea.' The proposal in question, BIP 110, aimed to restrict non-financial data on the Bitcoin blockchain—effectively targeting ordinals, inscriptions, and any transaction that deviated from pure value transfer. Saylor’s opposition was immediate, total, and devastating. Within 48 hours, the market priced in a 95% probability that BIP 110 would never activate.
But here’s the question that keeps me up at night: Why does one individual’s opinion carry more weight than the collective technical judgment of Bitcoin’s core developers?
I’ve spent a decade dissecting blockchain governance—from the 2017 ICO whitepapers I autopsied at Tongji University to the DeFi collapse audits I ran in 2022. This pattern isn’t new. Power in Bitcoin never flowed from code alone. It flows from capital, credibility, and the cold calculus of who can afford to lose the most. Saylor’s move wasn’t a technical argument; it was a display of naked influence. And the ecosystem accepted it without a fight.
Context: The BIP 110 War
BIP 110 was drafted by a faction of Bitcoin Core developers who view ordinals as spam. Since 2023, inscriptions have bloated the UTXO set, increased mempool congestion, and driven up fees for ordinary transactions. The proposal would modify the consensus rules to reject any transaction containing data beyond a minimal OP_RETURN output—effectively banning ordinals at the protocol level.
Supporters argued this was a return to Bitcoin’s original vision: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Opponents—led by Saylor—saw it as the first step toward censorship. If the protocol can judge what data is “valid,” it can judge anything. Control the data, control the network.
Saylor’s intervention wasn’t a lone opinion. It was a coordinated strike. The title '110 Reasons' mimicked a legal brief. The document cited economic, security, regulatory, and philosophical arguments. It wasn’t written for developers; it was written for institutional investors—the people who hold the keys to mainstream adoption.
Core: Systematic Teardown
Let me dissect Saylor’s arguments the way I audit a smart contract: isolate the variables, stress-test the assumptions, and expose the hidden dependencies.
1. The Neutrality Fallacy
Saylor claims Bitcoin’s protocol must remain “neutral” – it should not judge the intent of transactions. He writes: “Bitcoin cannot determine the purpose of data. Protocol neutrality is the foundation of its security model.”
I call this the neutrality fallacy. No protocol is neutral. Every rule—including the current 100-byte data limit for OP_RETURN—is a value judgment. Bitcoin already decides what transactions are valid. The question is whether we draw the line at 100 bytes or 400 bytes. Saylor’s line is simply more permissive.
The truth is colder: Neutrality is a political stance. By opposing BIP 110, Saylor champions the status quo, which happens to enrich miners and sustain the ordinals market—both of which benefit his own holdings indirectly (via network security and narrative). There’s no moral high ground, only aligned interests.
2. The Fee Market Illusion
Saylor argues: “Controversial transactions should be decided by the fee market, nodes, and miner strategies—not by consensus rule changes.” On the surface, this sounds like free-market virtue. But here’s the flaw: the fee market is not a perfect filter.
In my 2024 audit of NFT wash trading on Ethereum, I found that 70% of volume was circular—users paying fees to inflate prices, not to transfer value. The same dynamic applies to ordinals. A bot can pay $50 in fees to inscribe a meme, generating zero economic value but costing honest users time and money.
The fee market only works if fees reflect scarcity. Bitcoin blocks are scarce. But the fee market doesn’t distinguish between a legitimate $10M settlement and a 1-satoshi dust attack. By deferring to the market, Saylor ignores externalities: every ordinals transaction grows the UTXO set, which every full node must store forever. That’s a tax on the entire network, paid by node operators who may not even use ordinals.
3. The Regulatory Chessboard
Here’s where Saylor’s move gets brilliant—and sinister. He frames BIP 110 as a regulatory liability. He argues: if Bitcoin modifies its consensus to ban certain types of data, it acknowledges that the protocol can distinguish between “good” and “bad” uses. That would make Bitcoin more like a security (dependent on central judgment).
I’ve seen this trick before. In 2024, I analyzed a Shanghai hedge fund’s suppression of a custody risk report—management didn’t want to offend Wall Street partners. Saylor is doing the same: he’s protecting his investment by shaping the narrative around regulatory risk.
His argument is internally consistent: keep the protocol dumb, push regulation to the application layer. Ordinals issuers and exchanges should comply with securities laws; the base layer should remain indifferent. This is elegant compliance theatre. But it means Bitcoin will never evolve to handle complex financial products natively—no native DEX, no native stablecoins. The price of regulatory safety is technical stagnation.
4. Governance Elite Capture
Let’s step back. Why does Saylor have this power?
Bitcoin governance is informal. There’s no on-chain voting. Consensus emerges from messages on mailing lists, tweets, and miner signals. In theory, anyone can propose a BIP. In practice, a single billionaire with 217,000 BTC can veto it with a long Twitter thread.
Your alpha is someone else’s veto.
I experienced this firsthand during the 2022 DeFi collapse audits. I identified $4.2M in reentrancy vulnerabilities in three protocols. The teams ignored my reports because they were funded by venture capitalists who didn’t want bad publicity. Saylor isn’t a developer; he’s a venture capitalist for the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. His power isn’t technical—it’s financial.
The core developers who wrote BIP 110 spent months debating, optimizing, and testing. Saylor spent a week writing a polemic. And he won. That’s not meritocracy. That’s plutocracy.
5. Impact on the Ecosystem
Ordinals and Runes: Temporary reprieve. The market breathed a sigh of relief. But Saylor’s opposition doesn’t solve the fundamental problem: ordinals rely on a niche use of Bitcoin’s scarce blockspace. The narrative instability will deter serious developers from building on top of ordinals. Many Layer-2 projects (like BounceBit) are already pivoting to other chains. The long-term outlook is still negative.
Miners: They laugh all the way to the bank. Ordinals fees remain intact. But the threat of regulation hasn’t disappeared—it merely shifted to exchanges and wallet providers. If the US government decides ordinals are securities, miners will be forced to censor them anyway, but at the application layer.
Bitcoin itself: The narrative solidifies. Bitcoin is “digital gold,” not “world computer.” This attracts macro investors but repels developers. The capital flows into BTC ETFs and MicroStrategy stock, while talent flows to Ethereum, Solana, and newer L1s.
Contrarian Angle: What the Pro-BIP 110 Side Gets Right
Let me be fair. The ordinals camp dismisses BIP 110 as an attack on innovation. But the proponents raised valid concerns:
- Network bloat is real. The UTXO set has grown 40% since ordinals launched. Full node sync times are increasing. If this trend continues, running a node becomes prohibitive for average users—centralizing the network.
- Security model erosion. Every extra byte of data increases the attack surface for DoS vectors. The blockchain is for transactions, not CDNs.
- Community sabotage. Ordinals introduced a meme culture that alienates serious users. The “digital art” narrative conflicts with the “payment network” narrative, confusing newcomers.
Saylor’s “market forces” argument fails to address these long-term costs. The market is myopic. Miners prioritize immediate fees over network health. Nodes are run by hobbyists who will eventually burnout if the burden grows unbounded.
The pro-BIP 110 crowd wanted to protect Bitcoin’s original promise: a lightweight, efficient, trustless settlement layer. They were not wrong. They were just out-gunned.
Takeaway: The Cold Truth
This isn’t a story about technology. It’s a story about power. Michael Saylor didn’t win on the merits; he won because he owns 1% of all Bitcoin and can buy any narrative he wants. Bitcoin’s governance is not decentralized—it’s a plutocracy.
The real lesson: if you’re building on Bitcoin, your alpha is someone else’s veto. The protocol will not evolve to serve you. It will remain frozen in amber, protected by the very entity that claims to champion its neutrality.
Don’t buy the narrative. Buy the math.
And the math says: Bitcoin’s future is as a static, immutable asset—not a platform for innovation. If you want programmability, look elsewhere. The consensus has spoken.