Bitcoin hits a real consensus test on Aug. 9, 2026, when the mandatory signaling window for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 opens at block 961,632. BIP-110 targets arbitrary data embedded inside transactions. Miner support sits at 2.6 percent—and the fork activates anyway.
Nodes running BIP-110 software, specifically Bitcoin Knots, will start rejecting any block that fails to signal bit 4 from that height. This is a user-activated soft fork. These nodes enforce the new rules regardless of what miners do. If most miners keep producing non-signaling blocks, a chain split follows.
BIP-110 was authored under the pseudonym Dathon Ohm, with developer Luke Dashjr credited for an original draft. Proponents argue the proposal defends Bitcoin's role as sound money by capping what they call spam data. Their core argument: miners collect a fee once, but every node stores that data permanently.
The push gained momentum after data embedding expanded in 2022. Inscriptions and Ordinals—techniques that store arbitrary data inside transaction witness fields—went mainstream in early 2023, bringing NFT-style assets onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Critics of BIP-110 argue these are valid uses of paid block space.
The proposal adds seven consensus rules that cap the size of data fields in new transactions. The widely cited 83-byte figure applies specifically to OP_RETURN outputs. Existing UTXOs created before activation are permanently grandfathered—meaning existing Ordinals and inscriptions stay on-chain and are untouched.
BIP-110 also includes a self-expiry mechanism. The rules automatically terminate 52,416 blocks after activation, roughly one year. No additional vote or follow-up change required.
Miner support finished the last completed difficulty period at 1.29 percent of blocks, up from 0.45 percent two periods earlier. The current period sits near 2.6 percent. That figure is far below the 55 percent threshold required for early lock-in via miner signaling within a 2,016-block difficulty period.
Dathon Ohm said, "Bitcoiners are about to show the world, once again, what happens when the plebs stand up against large, corrupt institutions who are telling us Bitcoin isn't money and our nodes belong to them." Ohm advised miners planning to enforce BIP-110 to upgrade to Bitcoin Knots, warning against running Bitcoin Core, the network's principal software, which he said would become "insecure" under the new rules.
Critics including Michael Saylor and Adam Back have opposed BIP-110. They argue the block size limit already caps node costs and that a functional fee market prices out spam organically. Many observers point to near-zero miner support as evidence the proposal is dead—a premise its supporters reject.
The philosophy behind a user-activated soft fork holds that nodes, not miners, govern Bitcoin's rules. That principle drove SegWit's activation in 2017 despite initial miner resistance. SegWit's separation of digital signatures from transaction data later enabled the inscription techniques BIP-110 now seeks to restrict.
If a chain split occurs, the BIP-110 branch would operate with only a small fraction of Bitcoin's total hash rate. Some Bitcoin-only exchanges plan to temporarily pause deposits and withdrawals around the activation window. Bitcoin consensus depends on coordination across miners, exchanges and wallet providers—hash rate and node counts alone do not settle it.
Lock-in for BIP-110 is scheduled no later than block 963,648. Activation follows at block 965,664, with a projected date near Sept. 6, 2026. Enforcing nodes apply the new rules at that height regardless of broader miner consensus.
