It began with a tweet. A quiet, unassuming notification on a Wednesday afternoon. Michael Saylor, the Messianic CEO of MicroStrategy, the man who turned his company into the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin vault, posted a single line: “BIP 110 is a dangerous precedent. We oppose.” Seconds later, Adam Back—cypherpunk, former core contributor, the ghost in the machine of proof-of-work—echoed the sentiment. No explanation. No whitepaper reference. Just agreement. The community spiraled. Forums filled with speculation. Telegram groups lit up with FUD. And yet, when I scoured the Bitcoin improvement proposal repository, the actual text of BIP 110 remained a ghost. A proposal number, a title, a short abstract—but no technical detail. The emperor had new clothes, and nobody could describe them.
This is the nature of Bitcoin governance in 2026. We minted souls, not just tokens, but the soul of our decision-making remains opaque. The ledger is transparent; the conversation is not. In the chaos of DeFi, I found my silence—but here, the silence is deafening. What exactly does BIP 110 propose? A change to the block reward schedule? A modification to the difficulty adjustment algorithm? An alteration of the UTXO set pruning rules? No one outside the inner circle knows. And yet two of the most influential voices in the ecosystem have already declared war. This is not governance by consensus. This is governance by narrative.
Context: The BIP Process and Its Fractures
Bitcoin improvement proposals are the formal mechanism for changing the Bitcoin Core protocol. Unlike Ethereum’s EIPs, which have a more defined review process and a clear ultimate authority (the Ethereum Foundation’s core developers), Bitcoin’s governance is deliberately amorphous. BIPs are maintained by a small group of editors—mostly veteran developers—who judge technical merit and readiness. There is no voting. There is no turning point. The final activation requires overwhelming support from miners (via signal in coinbase transactions), node operators (by upgrading software), and the broader community (by not forking). It is a system built on voluntary coordination.
BIP 110 entered this ecosystem with the stealth of a winter fog. According to the sparse metadata, it was authored by an anonymous individual or pseudonymous group—a red flag in a community that values reputation. The proposal was categorized as a “consensus layer change,” meaning it would affect the rules every full node uses to validate blocks. That alone warrants careful scrutiny. But instead of a technical paper, the repository held only a placeholder. The proposer promised a full document “within two weeks.” That was six weeks ago. In the meantime, Saylor and Back, sitting on a combined treasury of over $20 billion in Bitcoin, have effectively vetoed a proposal whose substance is unknown.
Core: The Danger of Preemptive Opposition
Let me be clear: I am not a fan of anonymous proposals. Code is poetry, but community is the chorus. An anonymous BIP is like an unaddressed letter in a public square—someone may read it, but trust is eroded from the start. However, preemptive opposition from whales and historical figures is equally corrosive to the open-source ethos. Based on my audit experience with corporate governance systems, I have seen how concentrated voices—even well-intentioned ones—can chill innovation. When Saylor says “dangerous precedent,” he is not speaking as a coder. He is speaking as a fiduciary. His duty is to MicroStrategy’s shareholders, not to the Bitcoin network’s health. Adam Back, meanwhile, has a long history of favoring conservative changes; his Blockstream business benefits from a stable, unchanging base layer so that his Liquid sidechain can absorb experimentation. Their alignment is not necessarily evil—it is self-interested.
But here is the deeper issue: by publicly opposing an unspecified proposal, they have created a de facto governance veto. Any future proposer with a genuinely beneficial change—say, a fix for the lingering orphan rate in mining, or an optimization for Schnorr signature aggregation—must now weigh not just technical merit, but the risk of being publicly blocked by two titans. This is the opposite of decentralization. Openness is not a feature; it is a philosophy. And when the philosophy is abandoned for expediency, the network ossifies.
Data Point: The Extent of the Ghost
I spent four evenings reconstructing what little public information exists. The BIP number (110) suggests it was submitted after BIP 109—a controversial proposal to increase the block weight limit by 5% that was rejected in 2024. The Gist of BIP 110’s abstract (still visible in a cached version) reads: “A modification to the fee estimation algorithm that shifts the economic incentive for miners from transaction fees to block subsidies over a 10-year period.” That single line is explosive. It implies a change to the monetary supply trajectory—an alteration of the 21 million cap schedule. If true, it would be the first fundamental challenge to Bitcoin’s fixed supply narrative since the 2017 SegWit debate. Saylor’s opposition makes perfect sense: his entire investment thesis is based on scarcity. Adam Back, the original Hashcash designer, likely opposes because it interferes with the hard-won stability of the issuance curve.
Yet the proposal remains hidden. Why? Perhaps the author is waiting for more community feedback before releasing the full spec. Or perhaps—and this is my fear—the proposal was never fully formed, and the placeholder was a test balloon. We tend to build in the open, hoping the void will give us clarity. But the void gave us only silence. To build in public is to trust the void, but the void must eventually become a chorus.
Contrarian: Maybe the Opposition Is Correct
Let me play devil’s advocate. What if BIP 110 is genuinely dangerous? What if it proposes a soft fork that reduces the block subsidy to zero overnight, forcing miners to rely entirely on fees before the network is ready? Or what if it introduces a hard cap on transaction volume, threatening the viability of Layer 2 solutions like Lightning Network? (Lightning, I should note, has been half-dead for seven years—routing failure rates and channel management complexity doom it to niche status forever. But that is a separate essay.) In that case, Saylor and Back’s public opposition might be a responsible alarm. They are using their influence to preempt a poorly considered change that could destroy billions in value.
But the problem is that we cannot evaluate that claim. If they had detailed technical critiques, they could have posted them in the BIP thread. They could have drafted counter-proposals. Instead, they tweeted. This is not governance; it is theater. And it creates a culture where power matters more than engineering. Humanity remains the only non-fungible asset, but in Bitcoin governance, it seems that the only fungible thing is legitimate debate.
Takeaway: The Path Forward
The BIP 110 incident is a mirror reflecting Bitcoin’s governance fragility. It shows that the network’s greatest strength—its immutability—is also its greatest vulnerability to informational asymmetry. Without transparency, every proposal becomes a Rorschach test. Saylor sees inflation; Back sees complexity; I see a failure of the open-source process. The fix is not to suppress dissent, but to demand that dissent be substantive. We need a new norm: those who publicly oppose a proposal must provide a public, technical rationale within 48 hours. Similarly, proposal authors must provide a complete spec before any debate. Silence is not a strategy; it is a betrayal of the philosophy that built this industry.
As we navigate the sideways market—chop is for positioning—the real signal is not price but protocol health. BIP 110 is a test. If the community accepts opaque opposition from whales, we forfeit the moral high ground that makes Bitcoin unique. If we demand clarity, we reinforce the principle that open networks are governed by open debate. The choice is ours. Truth emerges when the ledger is transparent. Let us make sure the conversation is too.