BIP-110 has become a symbolic battle over Bitcoin’s future direction, from censorship resistance to network governance.
Bitcoin maximalist Justin Bechler has warned that the failure of BIP-110 would leave BTC permanently under the control of what he called a “fiat funding apparatus.”
He also argued that the network would lose its role as permissionless, censorship-resistant money.
BIP-110 Is Bitcoin’s “Line in the Sand”
With debate over the proposed soft fork continuing to divide members of the Bitcoin community, Bechler took to X, writing a lengthy post titled “My Plan for the Death of Bitcoin,” where he framed BIP-110 as a direct response to what he called catastrophic spam abuse that BTC’s network has suffered since February 2023, worsened after Core v.30 removed limits on OP-RETURN data.
According to him, Bitcoin’s defining feature is that anyone can run a node to use it as censorship-resistant money. Furthermore, Bechler claimed organizations such as Brink, Chaincode Labs, Spiral, OpenSats, and the Human Rights Frontier are reshaping the future of Bitcoin Core by “waging war against nodes.” As such, he claimed BIP-110 is necessary to protect that principle from growing centralization, and if it failed, it would embolden Core developers to strip away all the remaining restrictions until “nobody runs a node but Wall Street and government institutions.”
“If BIP-110 fails,” he wrote, “Bitcoin will have failed at its singular purpose and it will have been repurposed for non-monetary ‘use cases.’”
The BTC enthusiast also predicted that miners will, in the end, support the proposal because signaling costs them nothing, while rejecting it risks losing block rewards from enforcing nodes.
But despite saying that he would stop running a Bitcoin node and refuse to support a fork were the measure to fail, Bechler insisted that he was still optimistic about the OG crypto network’s future. “Bitcoin will win,” he wrote, adding that BIP-110 had already surpassed the signaling level reached by BIP-148 the day before its activation.
Community Still Divided Over the Proposal
The latest dispute comes on the heels of earlier criticism in late June, when opponents claimed that BIP-110 could make some wallet-generated addresses unspendable once it was activated. And as is expected of such emotive subjects, Bechler’s latest warning also drew mixed reactions across the Bitcoin community.
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One of them, BTC Inc’s Brandon, dismissed the post as “the type of rage quit that will form a generational bottom,” while another, podcast host Stephen Livera, argued that supporters of an alternative chain would ultimately create an altcoin separate from “the real Bitcoin.”
In another post, Livera shared comments from BTC developer Gregory Maxwell, who accused some of the advocates for BIP-110 of framing the proposal as an anti-spam measure while denying that same motivation when challenged.
Meanwhile, Chainstone Labs CEO Bruce Fenton took a different position, saying he was not deeply invested in the technical details but also suggesting that the larger risk for Bitcoin comes from increasing centralization and financialization and not the proposal itself.
Others, while remaining supportive of BIP-110, adopted a less absolute stance than Bechler. For instance, CoinCube founder Robert Allen said if the proposal failed, he wouldn’t abandon Bitcoin, although he would become more cautious and would also push for wider support for non-Core implementations such as Bitcoin Knots.
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