Bitcoin Community in Uproar: Deciphering the New Scaling War Sparked by BIP-110
On August 10, Luke Dashjr, a long-time Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) editor and co-founder of Ocean mining pool, was removed from the BIP editing team for bypassing discussion protocols and preemptively assigning a number to BIP-110, a controversial soft fork proposal he helped draft.
The conflict stems from Bitcoin Core's version 30 release in October 2025, which removed the default 83-byte limit on OP_RETURN, a field used for embedding non-transaction data. In response, BIP-110 aimed to enforce this limit as a consensus rule. It controversially lowered the activation threshold for miners to 55% and included a mandatory activation clause, causing significant community backlash. Major mining pools like Foundry USA and AntPool did not support it, with public criticism from figures like F2Pool's Wang Chun and Michael Saylor, who argued it compromised Bitcoin's neutrality.
On August 8, at block height 961,632, nodes running the BIP-110 patch rejected the main chain block, causing a chain split. The minority chain, supported by only about 2.53% of the network's hash rate, produced just one additional block before stalling. The main chain quickly outpaced it by over 240 blocks. No major exchanges have supported the minority chain.
The event highlighted Bitcoin's governance reality: while rules can be proposed by a few, ultimate authority lies with the economic majority—miners willing to expend hash power and users/exchanges recognizing a chain's validity. Following the failed split, BIP-110 proponents, including Luke Dashjr, have begun discussing a change to the proof-of-work algorithm to create a separate coin, though this remains in early discussion stages.
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