Written by Claude with input/fact checking from ChatGPT, Grock, Gemini and DeepSeek. They all agree:

BIP 110 & The Bitcoin Neutrality Debate

BIP 110 is a proposed soft fork to limit arbitrary data (like Ordinals inscriptions) in Bitcoin transactions. While the underlying concern about node storage and IBD burden is technically legitimate, the proposal has significant problems on multiple levels.

The most immediate disqualifier is implementation quality. The activation client has received serious criticism from multiple developers for insufficient review and testing, raising credible concerns about consensus-critical risk if deployed prematurely. Reviewers have documented test failures — including tests written by the author — and warned that the client cannot be confidently relied upon to coordinate a fork correctly. In Bitcoin, a client that cannot be verified to behave predictably at the consensus layer fails the most basic standard for deployment. Good intentions do not survive bad code.

The deeper problem is philosophical, and worth stating precisely. Bitcoin’s current validation model is syntactic and structural: a transaction is valid if it satisfies the script and pays the fee. The network enforces fixed rules without parsing the meaning of data. BIP 110’s restrictions are also mechanically defined — but they are explicitly motivated by suppressing specific use patterns. That distinction matters. Even if the rules are objective in form, building consensus logic around the purpose of data creates a precedent for intent-sensitive governance at the protocol layer. Once that precedent exists, the boundary between “inscription spam” and “non-standard multisig” or “unusual Lightning output” becomes a matter of politics, not protocol. This is a risk argument, not a settled fact — but it is a serious one.

The UASF mechanism raises a related concern. Without the broad economic alignment that made BIP 148 succeed in 2017 — miners, exchanges, and major businesses already converged — a minority UASF risks ending up as a minority chain rather than a reformed network. Whether that outcome materialises depends on coordination that has not happened. But the risk is credible, and credible critics have named it explicitly.

The genuine node operator concerns BIP 110 is trying to address — IBD time, storage growth, bandwidth — do have credible solutions: Assumeutxo, Erlay, and Utreexo all target the actual bottlenecks without altering what transactions are considered valid. These are slower, less dramatic paths. That is precisely the point. Bitcoin’s predictability is the feature.

#BIP-110
#RDTS
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