Key facts
- Michael Saylor views Bitcoin's consensus rules as a constitution and any changes as attacks on economic rights.
- He specifically targeted BIP-110, which proposes restricting non-financial data on the blockchain.
- Saylor also included covenants and larger-block proposals under his criticism of protocol changes.
- BIP-110 has minimal miner support, currently at 2.64%, well below the 55% needed for activation.
- The signaling window for BIP-110 is set to open around August 9.
Michael Saylor, Executive Chairman of MicroStrategy, has intensified his stance against proposed changes to Bitcoin's protocol, framing the network's consensus rules as a "constitution." In a recent nine-post thread on X, Saylor declared that any faction attempting to rewrite these rules is committing "economic theft" and attacking the "economic rights" of all participants.
Saylor's argument extends beyond a specific Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, BIP-110, which aims to restrict non-financial data like Ordinals inscriptions from the blockchain for approximately one year. He has now lumped BIP-110 together with other proposals, such as covenants (smart contract functionalities) and larger-block initiatives, labeling them all as instruments of the same "constitutional offense." He asserts that these changes impose the agenda, costs, and risks of a particular faction onto the entire Bitcoin network.
According to Saylor, Bitcoin's consensus rules function as its founding law. Rewriting them for ideological preferences, he argues, is equivalent to confiscating people's economic rights, impacting current users and future generations. He advocates for protocol changes to be rare, conservative, and driven by necessity rather than ambition.
BIP-110, primarily championed by pseudonymous author Dathon Ohm with input from developer Luke Dashjr, is supported by a segment of the Bitcoin community focused on preventing the blockchain from becoming a storage layer for arbitrary data. They argue that while miners collect fees for including such data, full node operators bear the long-term costs of storage, bandwidth, and validation. This perspective frames the proposal as a protection of scarce public resources rather than censorship.
However, BIP-110's mandatory signaling window is set to open around August 9, at block 961,632. Current miner support stands at a mere 2.64%, significantly below the 55% threshold required for activation, suggesting Saylor's opposition may have been effective in this instance. Commentator Fred Krueger noted that BIP-110 lumps together three distinct policy directions—data reduction, added functionality, and increased capacity—which do not represent a single coherent faction or agenda.