Bitcoin’s most consequential governance fights rarely play out in public view, but the quiet opposition of two towering figures—Blockstream co-founder Adam Back and Strategy founder Michael Saylor—to BIP 110 has suddenly raised stakes for the network’s future. According to the original report, both have warned that the proposal, which seeks to police certain transaction types, risks fracturing Bitcoin’s consensus and setting a perilous precedent.
BIP 110 does not originate from a technical upgrade but from an ongoing dispute over transaction spam. The idea behind the proposal is to give nodes and miners a framework for invalidating transactions deemed spam, essentially filtering out specific outputs before they enter the mempool. But for a network built on permissionless access and censorship resistance, any rule that lets someone decide which transactions are acceptable cuts straight toward a philosophical fault line. The debate is not hypothetical: for months, Bitcoin’s mempool has been filled with inscriptions and token traffic that some users call innovation and others call abuse. BIP 110 aims to tilt the scales toward one side of that argument.
This is not the first time Bitcoin has debated transaction filtering. In 2014, developers considered limiting OP_RETURN outputs to 40 bytes to curb data storage. The more recent inscription surge, which pushed fees to multi-year highs, rekindled similar calls for spam filters. Yet each time the community ultimately backed away from hard-coded restrictions, fearing a slippery slope toward censorship. BIP 110 represents the latest revival of that instinct, and the same fears now echo from voices like Back and Saylor.
Why Spam Policing Becomes a Governance Crisis
Back was characteristically direct. He argued that BIP 110 attempts to police other people’s transactions and directly conflicts with Bitcoin’s foundational principles of decentralization and permissionlessness. Forcing such a change on the network, Back warned, would only lead to a fork—a scenario where the chain splits into competing versions, each with its own set of consensus rules. Saylor took a similarly blunt stance, calling BIP 110 a move that would turn a spam dispute into a consensus change capable of invalidating some currently valid, fee-paying transactions.
Saylor pointed to the dangers of that precedent. If the network starts carving out exceptions for specific transaction types, it opens the door to a cascade of future demands—each faction seeking to enforce its own definition of legitimate use. The result, he suggested, could erode the very predictability that makes Bitcoin the anchor asset in an otherwise unpredictable crypto market. Institutions holding large positions on behalf of shareholders, such as Strategy, rely on Bitcoin’s rule set remaining stable. Arbitrary invalidation of even a small subset of transactions would undermine the asset’s core value proposition as a neutral, predictable ledger.
The spam filtering debate is not new. For years, portions of the community have argued that Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens—while technically valid—bloat the mempool and drive up fees for simple payments. BIP 110’s proponents see it as a cleanup tool. Opponents see something else: a permissioned gatekeeper function that could be turned against any activity that a vocal minority dislikes. Once you open that door, Back and Saylor argue, you cannot close it. That is why both have drawn a firm line, not because spam is harmless, but because the remedy might be worse than the disease.
The Fork Risk and Market Consequences
The most immediate worry is a chain split. A contentious fork does not merely create a new token; it forces exchanges, custodians, and users to choose a side. That process breeds confusion, and confusion breeds selling. In past episodes, Bitcoin forks—whether the Bitcoin Cash split or the SegWit2x standoff—triggered volatility as traders hedged or exited positions. If BIP 110 progresses against the wishes of a significant portion of the developer base and node operators, markets would face a similar replay, this time in an environment where institutional participation in on-chain assets is deeper than ever before.
Moreover, the divisions are not simply theoretical. Bitcoin’s developer landscape is already stretched thin, as recent developer activity data illustrates, with priorities spread across layer-2 scaling, security patches, and privacy improvements. Introducing a politically charged change like transaction filtering could distract from more critical work and push some contributors away. For a protocol that depends on a small circle of maintainers, that is not a trivial threat. Some core developers may simply walk away from a project they see as increasingly fractured.
What Remains Uncertain
Despite the high-profile opposition, it is unclear how much traction BIP 110 retains among the broader mining and node community. Miners, who collect fees, may resist anything that trims their revenue stream. But some node operators might favor a measure that promises to clean up what they see as wasteful on-chain activity. The debate also sits inside a larger question about Bitcoin’s long-term governance model: is Bitcoin ossification—where the protocol barely changes—the safer path, or does the network need some ability to adapt actively to new forms of abuse?
Back and Saylor are betting that the cost of intervention is far higher than the cost of living with some spam. Their position reflects a growing view among long-term holders that Bitcoin’s credibility hinges not on perfection but on predictability. As institutional capital pours into crypto infrastructure, the stability of the base-layer ledger becomes non-negotiable. A governance fight that drifts toward a fork would test that assumption far sooner than most market participants expect.
For now, the bickering stays in the developer mailing lists and forum threads. But the volume is rising. And when two of Bitcoin’s most recognizable architects draw a line, the rest of the ecosystem has to decide whether it cares enough about spam to risk splitting the chain—or whether that cure is worse than the disease.
