Adam Back Warns: Is BIP-110 Bitcoin’s Ultimate Downgrade?

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The Bitcoin community has discovered that even digital currencies are not immune to what humans optimistically call “progress.” A conflict has erupted around BIP-110, which by March 2026 has become one of the most discussed topics related to the leading cryptocurrency – largely because people never learn that improving things often improves them into ruin.

For those not familiar, BIP-110 is a Bitcoin improvement proposal, put forward by a developer under the pseudonym Dathon Ohm in December 2025 with the goal to limit the volume of arbitrary data, images, and video that are being written into the blockchain through protocols such as Ordinals and Runes. One cannot help but observe that the blockchain, originally designed to be a simple ledger, has become something of a digital attic where people insist on storing everything except their common sense.

The method, though, is the introduction of a temporary 12-month soft fork to filter spam at the consensus level. One wonders if “temporary” is the new “forever” in cryptocurrency vocabulary.

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Why Bitcoin veterans oppose BIP-110

This is where the key complication emerges, though complications in Bitcoin are rather like London fog – one becomes quite accustomed to them. Blockstream CEO Adam Back, a figure whom Satoshi Nakamoto himself mentioned in the Bitcoin white paper – a distinction that makes one feel either very important or very old – along with other industry veterans such as Jameson Lopp and Wang Chun, have come out categorically against BIP-110.

First and foremost, they cite the threat to neutrality. Back believes that attempts to censor transaction types at the consensus level are more harmful to the network than the spam itself, which he has been actively fighting. There is a certain poetry in this: a man who battles spam only to be told that the cure might be worse than the disease. One is reminded of governments everywhere.

Second is the risk of confiscation. The proposal could make some existing UTXOs unusable, which effectively amounts to freezing user funds. Nothing quite so thoroughly destroys one’s faith in decentralization as discovering that decentralization has a freeze button.

Finally, there is the risk of a network split. Activating a soft fork without broad agreement, with a proposed threshold of 55% instead of the traditional 95%, could lead to the blockchain splitting into multiple branches. One cannot help but feel that Bitcoin, the currency of unity, has developed a remarkable talent for division.

well a problem is 110 is an intentional literal downgrade. it breaks userspace. the bip freezes utxos, breaks miniscript, disables OP_IF and disables upgrade hooks. also temporary softfork is nuts.

– Adam Back (@adam3us) March 15, 2026

Adding fuel to debate, another well-known Bitcoiner under the nickname Hodlnaut accused Adam Back of arrogance and of ignoring the problem of protocol governance. One must have principles, after all, even if they belong to someone else.

BIP-110 will most likely go down in history as a great filter – though Bitcoin has had so many filters that one wonders if it isn’t simply a very complicated coffee machine. If the network rejects it, Bitcoin will reaffirm its resistance to censorship. If it accepts it, BTC will take its first step toward more centralized governance, where rules can change according to the prevailing agenda. Either way, someone will be disappointed, which is, one supposes, the only real certainty in this world – next to taxes and the fact that one’s computer will update exactly when one needs to use it.

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2026-03-15 20:19