The Bitcoin community's grand drama that lasted for a year has just concluded.

Written by: Liu Jiao Chain

At the end of summer, BTC was still fluctuating in the 64k range. The volatility was so low it felt dull, with both on-chain and off-chain activity quiet, like a restless wait before the start of a grand drama.

Recently, a grand drama within the Bitcoin community that lasted for a year has just concluded. On August 9, the BIP-110 mandatory signaling period began. On August 10, the fork failed after two blocks, and on August 11, OCEAN mining pool announced a return of hash power, Luke Dashjr resigned, and the BIP-110 proposal was closed. At that time, Jiao Chain wrote an article titled "BIP-110 Failure, Luke Dashjr Resigns" to document the event.

Now that the dust has settled, one of the opposing KOLs, Jameson Lopp, released a lengthy post-mortem on BIP-110, reviewing each of his prophecies made six months ago, and meticulously archiving the grandiose statements made by supporters over the past year. The original text is too long; below is a summarized version for readers to reference.

Prophecies Fulfilled

Six months ago, in February 2026, Lopp wrote an "Outsider's Guide to BIP-110" (refer to Jiao Chain's March 3, 2026, summarized version "Lopp Opposes BIP-110"), asserting that the proposal was reckless and destined to fail. At that time, he made four prophecies. Now, let's review:

First, there would be radicals who would insert child pornography content into the blockchain to blackmail miners and node operators. This has not yet occurred, but Lopp believes that conditions are getting closer to maturity, similar to how Luke Dashjr referred to the original Bitcoin chain as Bpedo (pedophile coin): inserting prohibited content before the fork would pollute both chains, but after the fork, it would no longer be a concern. (Note from Jiao Chain: Lopp may have exaggerated here; Luke used the term Bpedo to attack the original chain that did not support BIP-110 in a post dated May 27, 2026, rather than after the failure of the mandatory signaling.)

Second, BIP-110 would never reach the 55% activation threshold; as soon as the block height of 961632 arrived in early August, nodes running the BIP-110 code would fork off from the Bitcoin network. This was completely fulfilled.

Third, if OCEAN was the only pool supporting the fork, with its approximately 1% hash power of the entire network, it could only produce 1 to 2 blocks a day, meaning it would take nearly 3 years to reach the next difficulty adjustment. This was also fulfilled; OCEAN indeed set BIP-110 as the default stratum template, becoming the only supporting pool.

Fourth, rational miners would not persist too long on a minority fork, as they would realistically be unable to realize block rewards. This was also fulfilled. On the entire BIP-110 fork chain, only a small group calling themselves Roughnecks mined all 4 blocks, then capitulated to economic reality, returning the next day to burn the money from 2 blocks, finally giving up completely. Afterward, OCEAN compensated the miners whose hash power was redirected.

All four prophecies hit the mark. Lopp stated that this is not any sort of mystical calculation, nor is it like conspiracy theorists suggest that he is a member of some conspiratorial group; the reasoning is simple: it’s a result of the economic trade-offs from both sides.

Economic Weight

In all previous Bitcoin splits, the focus has always been on economic weight, not slogans.

During the 2017 Bitcoin Cash split, there were Roger Ver and Wu Jihan, the largest mining manufacturers, and a significant amount of real capital backing it up. Even such heavyweight capital coalitions failed to persuade the ecosystem to follow. BSV had Calvin Ayre, mining farms, hash power, and the so-called endorsement of Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity (Craig Wright), but only convinced a small handful of people.

What is behind BIP-110? Lopp summarizes it as a pleb movement; among its vocal supporters, there are few wealthy individuals and very few companies. The largest related party, OCEAN, is one of the smallest pools in the industry, and the OCEAN management distanced themselves afterward, stating that this was merely the personal view of Luke Dashjr and Bitcoin Mechanic.

More crucially, previous forks promised economic benefits: greater throughput, lower fees, more functions. What did BIP-110 promise? Purity, morality, removal of functions, and less income for miners.

Bitcoin is driven by incentives and game theory, not by morality. Jiao Chain wrote in the recap of "BIP-110 Failure, Luke Dashjr Resigns" that the economic base determines the superstructure. One must admit that morality can only grow within a structure of interests, not the other way around.

Lopp further believes that the market has long provided the answer. He publicly proposed a trustless fork futures wager, but no one stepped up to the challenge; supporters merely responded with moral preaching. The only operational BIP-110 prediction market had a total trading volume of merely 4.6 BTC, with a winning rate of consistently below 20%. Capital votes with its feet, more honestly than any verbal argument.

Historical Context

Lopp reviewed the anti-spam debate, which is nearly as old as Bitcoin's history itself.

In December 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto introduced standard checks in version 0.3.18, only accepting known types of transactions. In 2014, OP_RETURN was introduced as a pressure relief valve, initially allowing only 40 bytes, with the Core release notes explicitly stating that storing arbitrary data was still discouraged. Between 2014 and 2015, protocols like Counterparty circumvented these restrictions by encoding data using multisignature structures, planting the seeds of philosophical divergence. In 2015, Core raised the OP_RETURN limit to 80 bytes, and large-scale stress testing that year filled the network.

From 2016 to 2021, a fragile balance was formed, with consensus layers remaining lenient while relay policies rejected or dissuaded some transactions, and miners decided what to put in blocks, with fees pricing scarce block space. The 2017 SegWit and 2021 Taproot altered the cost structure of data publishing, with SegWit providing discounts on witness data and Taproot removing script size limits. This was not aimed at producing NFTs, but objectively made on-chain arbitrary data cheaper.

In 2023, inscriptions ignited debates. Supporters claimed these were permissionless uses of block space, while opponents labeled them as junk exploiting loopholes. Between 2023 and 2024, the debate evolved into whether nodes should filter inscriptions. Luke Dashjr advocated for stricter relay filtering, while Core did not impose a comprehensive ban, justifying that real data senders could directly send transactions to miners or hide data within other legitimate structures, making filtering fragile.

In 2025, the original OP_RETURN logic was reversed. Core developers noted that the approximately 83-byte policy limit forced protocols like Citrea to circumvent it using worse methods, including creating eternally unspendable UTXOs. Consequently, Core 30 simply lifted the OP_RETURN default limit to 100,000 bytes. Lopp pointed out that this change was a passive response, not an active innovation; it did not create new network activity but merely acknowledged the established facts.

Then came 2026, with the emergence of BIP-110, attempting to restrict arbitrary data encoding through consensus rules. Supporters’ narrative grew increasingly desperate, ultimately sliding into extreme rhetoric surrounding child pornography.

There is a recurring pattern here: block one data channel, users will seek the next, while developers argue over whether to continue tightening filters or to allow the least harmful channels. Preventing the public's voice often does more than stopping the current situation. Data is like water; it cannot be blocked.

Technical Failures

Lopp continued the review, stating that BIP-110's failure was not only economic but also fundamentally technical.

The first candidate version, RC1, released in December 2025, failed functional testing, failed fuzz testing, and some tests were directly skipped, with binary files uploaded before being signed. Core maintainer Michael Ford advised everyone to wait for subsequent versions, while developer Rob Hamilton bluntly stated that the client likely had consensus bugs, which later proved to be unfortunately accurate and confirmed multiple times. In February, a script execution cache poisoning vulnerability was discovered; in June, an incompatibility with Miniscript wallets was found, meaning that some addresses would be unable to spend after activation; Knots’ own wallets could trigger this rule, risking users' funds. Ironically, Knots also degraded its own node sync performance by mistakenly disabling script caching. It was only two weeks before activation that people discovered an undocumented eighth consensus rule hidden within the implementation of BIP-110.

The most fundamental failure was that BIP-110 couldn't stop what it sought to block from the start. Just three hours after the proposal was published, Peter Todd embedded the entire BIP text into a fully compliant transaction. After that, various experts showcased their abilities, with some embedding continuous images through non-Taproot paths, while others proved that nearly 4MB of continuous data could fit within BIP-110's rules. Projects like RIP 110 demonstrated that every Bitcoin transaction could be a JPEG, and others provided daily updates on the ADVENT series, with GIFs, PDFs, MP4s, WASM executable files, tar.gz archives, and even entire directories of malicious software, all embedded on-chain in a manner compliant with BIP-110, at a cost four times cheaper than OP_RETURN.

Lopp wrote that Greg Maxwell pointed out this layer of glass long ago: BIP-110 admitted it was technically impossible to stop arbitrary data, while supporters’ mobilization slogans claimed they aimed to eliminate junk. Such a level of self-contradiction can only turn towards cultural dimensions, claiming this is to send a signal that certain use cases are not tolerated.

The Child Card

The debates of two eras ultimately played the same card: protecting children.

During the expansion debate era, Roger Ver shouted that babies were dying and was ridiculed for years. In the BIP-110 era, the card was played even more extremely, with supporters labeling opponents of BIP-110 as supporters of pedophilia.

Lopp commented on this: because it is understood that resisting arbitrary data through anti-censorship protocols is futile, simply claiming that you support pedophilia is as absurd as saying you support campus shootings because you advocate for gun rights. Using labeling tactics to establish consensus has never been a good strategy.

People who reason do not need to rely on moral high ground to win debates. The truth becomes clearer through debate, relying on facts and logic, not labels.

Supporters' Arguments

Lopp also summarized the main arguments of BIP-110 supporters over the year, claiming it serves as a reference for future generations to see how they slid into delusion step by step.

From a technical mechanism perspective, supporters emphasized that the activation code was designed to not fail. BIP-110 adopted a modified BIP9 process, with no timeout, a 55% miner signaling threshold, a maximum activation height, and a mandatory signaling period, stating explicitly that it would never enter a FAILED state, guaranteeing the mandatory signal locked in at the specified height at the latest. Moreover, once the mandatory signaling period began, blocks without signals would be rejected by BIP-110 nodes, and failure to signal thus became a punishable behavior. Supporters also argued that the 55% threshold was much lower than the usual soft fork requirement of 90% to 95%, and as the proposal was temporary, it would automatically expire after one year, fully acceptable as a reversible emergency measure.

From a game theory perspective, supporters argued that the cost of signaling was almost zero, while not signaling could lead to losing the entire block reward. Once 55% of hash power executed BIP-110, the 45% that did not signal would face the risk of orphaned blocks in the fork competition; rational miners would not risk losing that bit of inscription fees. They might verbally oppose it, but as the deadline approached, they would turn to support. Regarding the current low signaling rate, supporters stated that signals are measured over a 2016 block cycle, and expressing opinions months in advance is meaningless, with real actions happening in a final cascade; once approaching 30% to 40%, spectators would fear being left behind, and signaling would rapidly roll toward 55%.

Citing historical precedents, supporters referenced the 2017 SegWit/UASF, claiming the deadlock could rapidly reverse under trustworthy time pressure. Lopp found this the most laughable because the BIP-148 UASF of 2017 never truly triggered and was resolved by BIP-91. Supporters also cited the idea that users, rather than miners, define Bitcoin, asserting that exchanges, custodians, wallets, merchants, and users determine which chain counts, with miners only following the chain with value. Lopp remarked that while this statement itself is not wrong, supporters continually avoided a fact: BIP-110 never garnered any support from economically beneficial entities.

From a narrative perspective, supporters framed inscriptions as exploiting known vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-50428), stating that BIP-110 was a patch rather than censorship, and cited simulated data claiming it could filter out most non-financial transactions with zero false positives, adding that opposition mostly included marginal cases and theoretical discussions. They also brought up legal risks, claiming that arbitrary data on-chain would expose every node operator running a full node to legal jeopardy. Regarding node adoption, supporters emphasized the convenience of one-click installation for Knots and the growth in node shares, while Lopp pointed out that the number of nodes is the easiest metric to inflate; those charts appearing to grow were, in fact, mere self-delusion.

Lastly, a supporter named Rene Cuard created a website for an activation probability model, which once showed BIP-110's win probability exceeding 50%, but the website stumbled while trying to list economically beneficial entities supporting it, with many entries lacking evidence.

Predictions for the Next Steps

After reviewing the past, Lopp provided predictions for the future. He believes:

First, everyone who staked their reputation on this farce, whether they choose to follow the hard fork or slink back to Bitcoin, will continue to complain and cry. The theme of failed forks is eternal: failure is never the fault of the forkers; it’s always due to someone not fighting fairly.

Second, the puritans will not stop until they run onto a network that prohibits everything they despise. But they will ultimately discover that the warning is accurate: no matter what new network they launch, someone will cram arbitrary encoded data into it, if only to annoy these "busy bodies" of block space.

Third, the most devout puritans will sell their bitcoins. Luke has already stated he has sold (Note from Jiao Chain: this is malicious; Luke Dashjr lost most of his BTC to hackers at the end of 2022, refer to Jiao Chain’s article “Lost Coins” related situation on December 25, 2024), and Matthew Kratter and others claim they expect to sell. Lopp asserts that this will be a terrible financial decision, just like those who sold their bitcoins for BCH or BSV.

Fourth, regardless of what name Luke's hard fork chain goes by, it will not exceed BSV in terms of exchange rate and adoption rate, and it will hardly list on any sizable exchange. Exchanges list tokens either based on expected trading volume or high listing fees; the puritans’ forked coin holds no advantage on either front.

Final Summary

Lopp’s final summary consists of a few paragraphs addressed to the puritans:

"You don’t like to see people doing stupid things with Bitcoin. Welcome to the party; almost everyone who cares about Bitcoin dislikes seeing stupid things encoded in the planet's most secure permanent record. But the question is, will you allow yourself to be annoyed by this? Someone has done something you disagree with; will you continue living your life, or will you become the 'busy body' of the community, dedicating your life to stopping others from acting a certain way?

Almost everyone agrees; this is not a war worth fighting, as the battlefield has an asymmetric advantage for the party wanting to shove data onto the blockchain. You cannot force us to fight a war we don’t want to fight, and conversely, we cannot stop you from waging the holy war you want to fight. So enjoy your obsession, but don’t drag us down with you."

Lopp also mentioned that California lawyer Asaf Fulks launched a project attempting to establish a legal and technical framework for Bitcoin's consensus changes. By his standards, it’s clear why BIP-110 did not meet the threshold.

As for the lesson, Lopp summarizes that this farce has validated all assertions regarding game theory and network dynamics; the erroneous narratives concocted by the puritans should be thrown into the dustbin of history. A user-activated soft fork (UASF) with low overall support does not require a user-reject soft fork (URSF) to stop it; it will fail on its own. UASF requires far more than a small number of loud voices to succeed. And labeling every opponent as a pedophile, CSAM defender, or Epstein associate has never been a good strategy for building consensus.

Finally, Lopp concluded with a sarcastic remark: "Congratulations, Bitcoin puritans. You’ve complained on social media for several years, complained at conferences for a year, and what have you ultimately achieved? In a delightfully ironic twist, you successfully produced a worthless shitcoin."