Bitcoin’s BIP 110 fork deadline nears with miner support at zero

Two of Bitcoin’s most influential figures came out against it on Saturday. Strategy founder Michael Saylor posted that “there are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam,” arguing the proposal “turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions.” The precedent, he wrote, is the real danger.

Adam Back, the Blockstream co-founder whose hashcash design is cited in the bitcoin white paper, made a similar case at greater length, addressed to the newcomers backing the proposal.

“Bitcoin respectfully says no to what you want,” he said, adding that their real recourse, if unconvinced, is to group together and fork away, but that “bitcoin won’t be joining it.”

The support data shows what the broader market really thinks. BIP 110 does not rely on the usual path of overwhelming miner approval, but uses a user-activated soft fork, a mechanism in which nodes enforce a rule whether or not miners agree, set to a 55% miner-signaling threshold rather than the traditional 95%.

Backing is absent even at that significantly lower bar.

Miner signaling has never risen above about 1% in any period and stands at zero in the current one, with no major mining pool behind it, according to the BIP 110 signaling monitor.

Among the nodes that store and relay the chain, adoption sits in the low single digits, carried almost entirely by Bitcoin Knots, an alternative to the dominant Bitcoin Core software.