Miner support for BIP-110 dropped below 1% this week. The proposal to potentially disable Ordinals is effectively dead. Three weeks from its activation deadline, the signal is clear: the order book of hash power has spoken. Code does not negotiate. It executes or it fails. This one failed before it ever reached the threshold.
Context: BIP-110 was never about block size—it was about control. A faction within Bitcoin's development community pushed a change that could be used to alter OP_RETURN rules, effectively crippling Ordinals inscriptions. For three months, they lobbied. They presented technical arguments about spam and network bloat. Adam Back, one of Bitcoin's earliest cryptographic architects, publicly dismissed them: "They don't understand Bitcoin." His criticism wasn't a technical rebuttal—it was a governance signal. The signal said: we don't modify the protocol to kill specific use cases.
The proposal's mechanics were simple: if activated, it would allow miners to vote on changing block size limits in a way that could restrict data-heavy transactions. The Ordinals ecosystem—which had spawned a wave of inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, and NFT-like assets—saw this as an existential threat. But the market had already priced in the failure. The hash rate voting data showed support collapse from marginal to negligible.
Core Insight: The Miner Veto is Real.
This event is a stress test of Bitcoin's governance model, and it passed with one clear result: miners hold the ultimate veto. They are not a passive layer. They are the final arbiter of protocol change. The reason is simple economics. BIP-110 supporters framed their argument around network health and regulatory risk. But miners see transaction fees from Ordinals—real, profitable revenue. The average fee per block has climbed 35% since the Ordinals boom. Removing that would reduce miner income by roughly 10-15% on average, depending on network activity.
I've seen this pattern before. During the 2017 block size war, miners faced a similar choice: follow a core developer proposal (SegWit2x) that offered short-term fee relief but threatened long-term decentralization, or stick with the existing trajectory. They chose the latter then, too. The incentive structure is hardwired. Miners are profit-maximizers, not ideology maximizers. When a proposal threatens their bottom line, they vote with hash.
But there is a deeper layer here that most analysts miss. The chart shows fear; the order book shows intent. The fear was that Ordinals would be killed by protocol fiat. But the order book—the actual hash distribution—showed intent to reject. Miners didn't just fail to signal support; they actively voted no by ignoring the signaling window. That's a stronger rejection than a default 'no'.
Contrarian Angle: The Real Risk Has Shifted.
Everyone is celebrating BIP-110's failure as a victory for Ordinals and permissionless innovation. But the contrarian truth is more nuanced. The protocol-level kill switch is off the table, but the battle has merely moved to a more opaque arena: miner-led transaction censorship.
BIP-110 was a blunt instrument—a code change that would require consensus. That's why it failed. But individual mining pools can now choose to filter Ordinals transactions from their blocks. They could use block template selection to silently drop inscription-heavy transactions, effectively starving Ordinals of inclusion without changing any protocol rules. This is harder to detect, harder to fight, and far more insidious.
Consider the incentives. If a large pool decides that Ordinals are bad for Bitcoin's reputation or regulatory standing, they can quietly implement a policy. The network wouldn't fork. No BIP needed. The pool would simply refuse to include transactions with certain data patterns. This is technically feasible today. The question is whether any pool has the market power to make it stick. Currently, AntPool and F2Pool control roughly 30% of hash power. If either were to implement such a policy, Ordinals inclusion rates could drop by a third overnight.
Is this likely? No. Not yet. But the BIP-110 debate has publicly aired the desire to suppress Ordinals. That desire doesn't vanish because a proposal failed. It finds new channels. The most dangerous risk in crypto is not the code that runs; it's the code that never gets written but is enforced by social consensus.
Takeaway: Position for the New Reality.
The immediate implication is clear: Ordinals survive. The protocol layer is safe for now. This is a structural bullish signal for the entire inscription ecosystem—BRC-20s, Ordinal collections, and the infrastructure around them. I expect a relief rally in blue-chip Ordinal assets over the next two weeks.
But the longer-term play is on the infrastructure that makes Bitcoin more expressive without relying on miner goodwill. Layer 2 solutions that move data off-chain while maintaining security guarantees will gain traction. Projects like Stacks, which already enable smart contracts on Bitcoin, benefit from a narrative shift: the base layer remains immutable, but the application layer must be built elsewhere. The window for building on Bitcoin just got a little wider.
Survival precedes profit in the unregulated wild. BIP-110 is dead. Long live Ordinals. But watch the mempool. Watch mining pool policies. And remember: the order book always shows intent. You just have to know where to look.