Author: Liu Jiaolian
At the tail end of summer, BTC is still oscillating in the 64k range. Volatility is so low it's making people drowsy; both on-chain and off-chain activity is quiet, like the anxious wait before a major drama unfolds.
Recently, a major drama within the Bitcoin community that lasted a year has just concluded. The BIP-110 mandatory signaling period began on August 9th. It forked off two blocks on August 10th before failing. On August 11th, OCEAN Pool announced shifting its hash power back, Luke Dashjr stepped down, and the BIP-110 proposal was closed. Jiaolian wrote a piece titled "BIP-110 Fails, Luke Dashjr Steps Down" to document this event at the time.
Now that the dust has settled, Jameson Lopp, one of the opposing KOLs, published a lengthy BIP-110 postmortem. He revisited the prophecies he made six months ago, checking them off one by one, and cataloged the bold claims made by supporters over the past year. The original article is too long; what follows is a condensed translation for readers' reference and comparison.
Prophecies Fulfilled
Six months ago, in February 2026, Lopp wrote "A BIP-110 Layman's Guide" (see Jiaolian's condensed translation published on March 3, 2026, titled "Lopp Opposes BIP-110"), asserting that this proposal was reckless and doomed to fail. At that time, he made four prophecies. Now, reviewing them:
First, radicals would stuff child sexual abuse material (CSAM) into the blockchain to blackmail miners and node operators. This has not happened yet, but Lopp believes conditions are closer to being ripe—akin to Luke Dashjr labeling the original Bitcoin chain "Bpedo" (pedophile coin) as an attack. Stuffing illicit content before a fork would pollute both chains; after a fork, that worry is gone. (Jiaolian's note: Lopp might be reading too much into this here. Luke used the term "Bpedo" to attack the original chain for not supporting BIP-110 in a post on May 27, 2026, not after the BIP-110 mandatory signaling failed.)
Second, BIP-110 would never reach the 55% activation threshold. Once block height 961632 arrived in early August, nodes running BIP-110 code would fork off the Bitcoin network. This one was fully realized.
Third, if OCEAN was the only pool supporting the fork, with its roughly 1% of the network's total hash rate, it would only produce 1 to 2 blocks per day, taking nearly 3 years for the next difficulty adjustment. This also came true. OCEAN did set BIP-110 as the default stratum template, becoming the sole supporting pool.
Fourth, rational miners would not persist on a minority fork for long because they effectively could not realize block rewards. This also proved accurate. On the entire BIP-110 fork chain, only a small group calling themselves the Roughnecks mined all 4 blocks. Then, bowing to economic reality, they came back the next day to burn money on 2 more blocks before finally giving up entirely. OCEAN later compensated miners whose hash power was diverted.
Four prophecies, all hit. Lopp says this isn't some divine foresight, nor is he a member of some conspiratorial group as conspiracy theorists might think. The reason is simple: it's the result of economic trade-offs on both sides.
Economic Weight
In every Bitcoin split, what matters is economic weight, not slogans.
Bitcoin Cash in 2017 had Roger Ver and Jihan Wu behind it, the largest mining hardware manufacturer, massive real-money exchange migrations—such heavyweight capital alliances still couldn't persuade the ecosystem to follow. BSV had Calvin Ayre, mining farms, hash power, and the so-called true identity of Satoshi (Craig Wright) backing it, yet it only convinced a small group.
What did BIP-110 have behind it? Lopp's summary is that it was a pleb movement. Among its vocal supporters, there were few wealthy individuals and few companies. The largest associated party, OCEAN, is itself one of the smallest pools in the industry. Moreover, OCEAN's management distanced themselves afterward, saying it was merely the personal opinion of Luke Dashjr and Bitcoin Mechanic.
More critically, previous forks promised economic benefits: greater throughput, lower fees, more features. What did BIP-110 promise? Purity, morality, feature removal, and less revenue for miners.
Bitcoin is driven by incentives and game theory, not by morality [1]. When Jiaolian recapped in "BIP-110 Fails, Luke Dashjr Steps Down," he wrote that the economic base determines the superstructure. We must acknowledge that morality can only grow within a structure of interests, not the other way around.
Lopp goes further, believing the market had already given the answer. He publicly proposed a non-custodial, trustless futures bet on the fork; no one took the challenge. Supporters only responded with moral preaching. The only operating BIP-110 prediction market had a total volume of merely 4.6 BTC, with winning odds consistently below 20%. Capital votes with its feet, more honest than any war of words.
Historical Context
Lopp reviews the anti-spam debate, which is almost as old as Bitcoin itself.
In December 2010, Satoshi added standardness checks in version 0.3.18, only accepting known transaction types. In 2014, OP_RETURN was introduced as a pressure relief valve, initially allowing only 40 bytes. Core's release notes explicitly stated that storing arbitrary data was still discouraged. From 2014 to 2015, protocols like Counterparty bypassed restrictions by encoding data using multi-signature and other structures, planting the seeds of philosophical divergence. In 2015, Core increased the OP_RETURN limit to 80 bytes. That same year, large-scale stress tests flooded the network.
From 2016 to 2021, a fragile balance formed: the consensus layer remained permissive, relay policies rejected or discouraged certain transactions, miners decided what went into blocks, and fees priced the scarce block space. SegWit in 2017 and Taproot in 2021 changed the cost structure of data publishing. SegWit discounted witness data; Taproot lifted script size limits. This wasn't for issuing NFTs, but objectively made putting arbitrary data on-chain cheaper.
In 2023, inscriptions ignited the debate. Supporters called it permissionless, paid use of block space; opponents called it spam exploiting a vulnerability. From 2023 to 2024, the debate shifted to whether nodes should filter inscriptions. Luke Dashjr advocated for stricter relay filtering. Core did not implement a comprehensive ban, reasoning that those truly wanting to send data could send transactions directly to miners or hide data in other legitimate structures, making filtering fragile.
In 2025, the original OP_RETURN logic was reversed. Core developers observed that the policy cap of ~83 bytes forced protocols like Citrea to use worse workarounds, including creating UTXOs that could never be spent. So Core 30 simply lifted the default OP_RETURN limit to 100,000 bytes. Lopp points out this change was a passive response, not an active innovation. It didn't create new network activity; it merely acknowledged an established fact.
Then came 2026, with BIP-110 attempting to restrict arbitrary data encoding via consensus rules. Supporters' narratives grew increasingly desperate, ultimately sliding towards extreme rhetoric involving child sexual abuse material.
A recurring pattern emerges here: plug one data channel, and users find the next. Developers then debate whether to tighten filtering further or permit the least harmful channel. Preventing people from speaking is harder than damming a river. Data is like water; you cannot block it.
Technical Failure
Lopp continues his postmortem. BIP-110's failure wasn't just economic; it was also a technical mess.
The first candidate version, RC1 in December 2025, failed functional tests, failed fuzz tests, some tests were outright skipped, and binary files were uploaded before being signed. Core maintainer Michael Ford advised waiting for later versions. Developer Rob Hamilton bluntly said the client likely still had consensus bugs, which later proved true—and true multiple times. In February, a script execution cache poisoning vulnerability was discovered. In June, incompatibility with Miniscript wallets was found; after activation, some addresses would become unspendable. Knots' own wallet could trigger this rule, potentially causing users to lose funds. More ironically, Knots degraded its own node's sync performance by mistakenly disabling the script cache. Just two weeks before activation, an undocumented eighth consensus rule hidden in BIP-110's implementation was discovered.
The most fundamental failure was that BIP-110 couldn't block what it intended to block from the start. Merely 3 hours after the proposal's release, Peter Todd embedded the entire BIP text into a fully compliant transaction. Subsequently, various experts took turns demonstrating: someone embedded sequential images using non-Taproot paths; someone proved that under BIP-110 rules, nearly 4MB of continuous data could be stuffed in; the RIP 110 project argued every Bitcoin transaction could be a JPEG; the ADVENT series released daily updates—GIFs, PDFs, MP4s, WASM executables, tar.gz archives, even a directory of malware—all embedded on-chain in BIP-110 compliant ways, costing 4 times less than OP_RETURN.
Lopp writes that Greg Maxwell had long ago pierced this veil: BIP-110 itself admitted that technically preventing arbitrary data was impossible, yet supporters' rallying cry was to eliminate spam. Faced with such contradiction, they could only pivot to the cultural level, saying this was to send a signal that certain use cases were not tolerated.
The Child Card
Debates across two eras ultimately played the same card: protecting children.
During the scaling debate era, Roger Ver's "babies are dying" was ridiculed for years. In the BIP-110 era, this card was played even more extremely. Supporters labeled BIP-110 opponents as pro-pedophilia.
Lopp comments on this: Because you understand that fighting arbitrary data on a censorship-resistant protocol is futile, they call you pro-pedophilia. This is as absurd as calling someone pro-school shooting for supporting gun rights. Building consensus by smearing opponents with labels has never been a good strategy [1].
Those who rely on reason don't need the moral high ground to win debates. Truth becomes clearer through debate, relying on facts and logic, not labels.
Supporters' Arguments
In the article, Lopp also organizes the main arguments of BIP-110 supporters over the past year, saying it's for posterity to see how they gradually slid into delusion.
Regarding technical mechanisms, supporters emphasized the activation code was designed not to fail. BIP-110 used a modified BIP9 process: no timeout, a 55% miner signaling threshold, a set maximum activation height, and a mandatory signaling period. The specification stated it would never enter a FAILED state; mandatory signaling guaranteed locking in at the specified height at the latest. Once the mandatory signaling period began, blocks not signaling would be rejected by BIP-110 nodes, making non-signaling a punishable act. Supporters also said the 55% threshold was much lower than the usual 90% to 95% required for soft forks. The proposal was also temporary, automatically expiring after one year, and could be accepted as a reversible emergency measure.
Regarding game theory, supporters argued signaling cost was almost zero, while not signaling risked losing the entire block reward. Once 55% of the hash rate enforced BIP-110, the non-signaling 45% would face orphan risk in the fork competition. Rational miners wouldn't risk losing block rewards to preserve some inscription fees; they might oppose verbally but capitulate as the deadline neared. As for the low current signaling rate, supporters said signaling was measured over 2016-block periods; signaling months in advance was meaningless. The real action would be a last-minute cascade. Once it neared 30% to 40%, fence-sitters would fear being left behind, and signaling would rapidly roll toward 55%.
Regarding historical precedent, supporters cited SegWit/UASF in 2017, claiming a stalemate could flip rapidly under credible deadline pressure. Lopp finds this the most laughable, as the 2017 BIP-148 UASF never actually triggered; it was resolved by BIP-91. Supporters also invoked the saying that users, not miners, define Bitcoin, arguing exchanges, custodians, wallets, merchants, and users decide which chain counts, and miners can only follow the valuable chain. Lopp comments that this statement itself is correct, but supporters consistently avoided one fact: BIP-110 never gained support from any economically significant entity.
Regarding narrative, supporters framed inscriptions as exploiting a known vulnerability (CVE-2023-50428), saying BIP-110 was patching, not censorship. They cited simulation data claiming it could filter most non-financial transactions with zero false positives, dismissing opposition as mostly edge cases and armchair theory. They also invoked legal risk, claiming arbitrary data on-chain exposes every full node operator to legal liability. Regarding node adoption, supporters highlighted Knots' one-click installation convenience and growing node share. Lopp points out that node count is the easiest metric to inflate; those charts that look like growth are merely self-comfort.
Finally, a supporter named Rene Cuard created an activation probability model website that once showed BIP-110's winning odds over 50%. However, this website tripped up when trying to list supporting economic entities; many entries simply lacked evidence.
Next Predictions
After reviewing the past, Lopp offers predictions for the future. He believes:
First, everyone who staked their reputation on this farce, whether choosing to follow the hard fork or slinking back to Bitcoin, will continue to complain and cry. A perpetual theme of failed forks is that failure is never the forker's fault; it's always a conspiracy by those who didn't fight fair.
Second, the puritans won't stop until they're running a network that bans everything they despise. But they will eventually discover that the warnings were accurate: no matter what new network they launch, people will stuff it full of arbitrarily encoded data, if for no other reason than to annoy these block space "busybodies."
Third, the most devout puritans will sell their Bitcoin. Luke already said he sold his (Jiaolian's note: That's quite a dig! Luke Dashjr had most of his BTC stolen by hackers at the end of 2022; see Jiaolian's article "Lost Coins" from December 25, 2024, for relevant details). Matthew Kratter and others said they expected to sell. Lopp asserts this will be a poor financial decision, just like those who sold Bitcoin for BCH or BSV back in the day.
Fourth, no matter what Luke's hard fork chain is called, it will not surpass BSV in exchange rate or adoption and will hardly be listed on any exchange of scale. Exchanges list tokens either based on expected trading volume or substantial listing fees; the puritan fork coin has neither.
Final Summary
Lopp's final summary is a few paragraphs addressed to the puritans:
"You don't like seeing people do stupid things with Bitcoin. Welcome to the party—almost everyone who cares about Bitcoin doesn't like seeing stupid stuff encoded into the planet's most secure permanent record. But the question is, will you allow yourself to be bothered by it? When someone does something you don't agree with, do you go on with your life, or do you become the annoying 'busybody' in the community, dedicating your life to stopping others from acting in a certain way?
Almost everyone agrees this isn't a war worth fighting because the battlefield gives an asymmetric advantage to the side wanting to stuff data into the blockchain. You cannot force us to fight a war we don't want to fight. Conversely, we cannot stop you from fighting your holy war. So, enjoy your obsession, but don't drag us into it."
Lopp also mentions that California lawyer Asaf Fulks released a project attempting to establish a legal and technical framework for Bitcoin consensus changes. Measured by his standards, why BIP-110 failed to meet the threshold becomes clear.
As for the lessons, Lopp concludes that this farce validated all assertions about game theory and network dynamics. The false narratives concocted by the puritans should be tossed into the dustbin of history. A User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) with overall low support doesn't need any User-Rejected Soft Fork (URSF) to stop it; it fails on its own. A UASF requires far more than the support of a small, loud group. And labeling every opponent a pedophile, CSAM apologist, or Epstein accomplice has never been a good strategy for building consensus.
Finally, Lopp ends with a sarcastic note: "Congratulations, Bitcoin puritans. You've complained on social media for years, then complained at conferences for another year, and finally achieved what? In a delightfully ironic twist, you've successfully created a worthless shitcoin."
