Michael Saylor Comes Out Against Bitcoin’s BIP-110, Calling the Anti-Spam Soft Fork ‘a Bad Idea’

The Strategy chairman warned that writing a spam ban into Bitcoin’s consensus rules is more dangerous than the spam itself, joining a wall of opposition weeks before an August deadline.

Michael Saylor, executive chairman and co-founder of Strategy, has come out against BIP-110, the contested proposal to purge so-called spam data from the Bitcoin blockchain.

Saylor said in a lengthy X post on Sunday that the plan threatens the network’s neutrality. “The proposed cure is more dangerous than the condition,” he wrote.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

BIP-110, formally the Reduced Data Temporary Soft Fork, would impose a one-year set of seven consensus restrictions capping the size of data payloads and blocking certain non-monetary uses, targeting Ordinals inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, and Runes. It also lowers the miner signaling threshold for activation from the customary 95% to 55%, a move Saylor called “too aggressive” and one he warned could trigger a chain split and broad market uncertainty.

Saylor said the upgrade threatened Bitcoin’s position as a stable, permissionless network that does not pick and choose which transactions are valid. He said writing a spam ban into consensus flips that logic, letting human judgment override the protocol and setting a precedent that could later be aimed at privacy tools or corporate applications. He also flagged an economic risk: suppressing certain uses could sap transaction-fee demand, weakening miners’ incentive to secure the chain as the block subsidy keeps halving.

Strategy, the largest publicly listed Bitcoin treasury company, holds 843,775 BTC worth roughly $54.18 billion, giving Saylor an outsized stake in the outcome. His preferred alternative is to leave consensus untouched and let market-based fees and individual node relay policies handle spam. He is not alone: Blockstream CEO Adam Back and developer Jameson Lopp have also called the proposal reckless.

The fight is coming to a head. Bitcoin developers have debated the proposal since it surfaced last year as BIP-444, and it now faces a mandatory signaling window projected for early August. Miner support has never topped roughly 1%, meaning that at current levels the effort would spin off a small minority chain rather than change Bitcoin itself.

Related Listen: How the Strategy Empire Breaks, and Whether Saylor Can Stop It