The activation of the controversial soft fork BIP-110, designed to cleanse Bitcoin of NFT-type Ordinals registrations for a year, is entering its home stretch. Exactly three weeks remain until the block 961,632 deadline, when nodes supporting the project will begin forcibly rejecting blocks that do not signal support for the upgrade.
Activists have attempted to present support for BIP-110 as the ultimate test of being a “real Bitcoiner.”
However, in response to claims that the soft fork would separate real Bitcoiners from fakes, Blockstream CEO Adam Back offered a rather blunt assessment of his opponents’ competence and directly stated: “They don’t know Bitcoin.”
The debate that divides Bitcoin leaders before the split
According to Back, the initiative’s supporters may have good intentions, but they simply don’t understand how Bitcoin works and confuse true consensus with ultimatums issued on social media platforms such as X.
The situation around BIP-110 has divided the Bitcoin community into two camps. One side believes that spam transactions should be forcibly restricted to protect network decentralization, while the other sees the proposal as a threat of permissionlessness.
I think bipcoiners are bitcoiners, they are just misled, don’t know how bitcoin works, nor the IETF bitcoin type process; And unfortunately some of them will become disillusioned in a few weeks when the 110 forks and stalls.
-Adam Back (@adam3us) July 20, 2026
Opponents of the fork, including Back and Strategy founder Michael Saylor, who recently published a manifesto against the upgrade, insisting that transaction fees should be determined by the market.
According to the latter camp, Bitcoin must remain economically neutral, while any attempt to filter data constitutes subjective censorship which undermines the very nature of the system.
Despite the intense debate on media platforms, on-chain statistics show that miners and major capital holders have largely ignored the project. Actual signaling participation among mining pools remains stuck at 0.86%.
To lock in the upgrade under its reduced activation rules, the project must secure at least 55% of the network’s hash rate, which is now mathematically unrealistic.
No exchange-traded futures contracts have emerged for the fork, and it has no liquidity or significant funding. Back even mocked the movement’s organizers for their failure to monetize the campaign and raise money for a “cypherpunk afterparty.”
In three weeks, when the mandatory signaling code goes into effect, nodes supporting the upgrade will begin rejecting standard blocks, potentially causing a Bitcoin chain split. However, since the new branch does not have sufficient computing power, Back predicts that it will immediately hit a dead end.
