Michael Saylor: Bitcoin Code Is a Constitution, Changes Are Attacks on ‘Economic Rights’

Michael Saylor isn’t fighting BIP-110 anymore—he’s fighting the very idea that Bitcoin’s code can be changed. The Strategy executive chairman posted a nine-post thread to X on Tuesday that reframes the entire protocol debate as a constitutional crisis.

“Bitcoin has won. Now it must survive victory,” Saylor wrote on X. “Its gravest threat is not an enemy at the gates, but corruption from within: factions that invent pretexts, rewrite the rules, and seize economic rights until freedom becomes permission and law becomes loot.”

Saylor has been attacking a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal dubbed BIP-110 specifically. The “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork” proposal that would restrict non-financial data like Ordinals inscriptions from Bitcoin’s blockchain for around one year. Last week, Saylor posted a 110-point essay opposing it under the title “110 Reasons BIP 110 Is a Bad Idea.”

Based on the current status of the proposal, his point of view seems to have prevailed. Now Saylor lumped BIP-110 together with covenants—smart contract-style restrictions that would let users pre-program how their Bitcoin can be spent in the future—and larger-block proposals, which call for increasing how much data fits in each block to process more transactions. His verdict on all of them: different ideas, same crime.

“Some proposals, like BIP-110, censor valid fee-paying transactions. Others add covenant machinery. Others demand larger blocks,” he wrote. “Different instruments, same constitutional offense: a faction rewrites Bitcoin’s rules and imposes its agenda, costs, and risks on everyone.”

The constitutional metaphor is doing real work here. Bitcoin’s consensus rules—the shared set of rules all nodes and miners agree on to determine what counts as a valid transaction—are the functional equivalent of a country’s founding law in Saylor’s framing. Rewrite them for any faction’s ideological preferences, he argues, and you’re not just updating software. You’re confiscating people’s economic rights.

“Bitcoin’s consensus rules are its constitution,” he wrote. “To rewrite them for the convenience of any faction is to attack the economic rights of every participant today and every generation to come.”

“Protocol changes must be rare, conservative, and driven by necessity, not ambition. Defend Bitcoin’s constitution. Defend the future,” he wrote.

BIP-110’s principal advocate is its pseudonymous author Dathon Ohm with longtime Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr being a key participant in the writing of the original draft. The proposal is supported primarily by a relatively small “anti-spam” constituency around Bitcoin Knots and node operators who believe Bitcoin should remain focused on peer-to-peer money rather than becoming a permanent storage layer for things like Ordinals, tokens, images, and other arbitrary data.

The argument is that miners collect a one time fee for including those payloads, while every full node operator has to bear the long-term storage, bandwidth and validation costs. From their perspective this is not censorship per se, but more a protection of a scarce public resource (i.e., the blockchain’s capacity)

BIP-110’s mandatory signaling window—the point at which nodes running the proposal’s software begin rejecting non-compliant blocks—opens around August 9, at block 961,632. Miner support sits at 2.64%, according to the BIP-110 signaling dashboard, well short of the 55% required for activation.