“Whoever blinks first wins.”

These are the words of Bitcoin Mechanic at about 53 minutes into the interview that Danny Knowles did with him on What Bitcoin Did this past May 26. Mechanic is a developer at Ocean, a mining pool, and he is the main supporter of BIP 110.

I have talked about BIP 110 (formerly BIP 444) in this newsletter several times, starting from stop #274.

In two sentences for those who have not followed the debate: BIP 110 is a user-activated soft-fork proposal (UASF, a change to the consensus rules that does not require the miners’ yes) that would ban for twelve months OP_RETURNs above 83 bytes, certain scripting functions inside Taproot (such as OP_IF, OP_NOTIF, OP_SUCCESS) and other technical hooks used by those who want to store images and files inside the blockchain. The planned activation date is August 7, 2026, after which the rules expire automatically.

The spam that the proposal wants to fight today almost no longer exists. The inscriptions, after the explosion of the previous two years, have died down almost on their own. The blockchain is half-empty and fees are at multi-year lows, precisely because the demand for block space is extremely low. Mechanic himself describes the blockchain as a “ghost town,” and it is an honest definition, but it is the opposite symptom to the one that would justify an emergency intervention on the consensus rules.

From the What Bitcoin Did interview, three problems emerge in Mechanic’s arguments.

The temporary that isn’t

Mechanic insists on the expiration: twelve months, then everything goes back to how it was before: Reduced Data Temporary Soft-Fork. It is true at a technical level, no one can extend it on their own. But the text of the proposal itself admits that after activation we will in any case return to the traditional filters to fight spam, because consensus is not a suitable tool for that job. He himself, in the interview, acknowledges this.

So what remains standing when the soft-fork expires? The precedent. The memory that, faced with a situation perceived as an emergency by a niche, it is legitimate to modify Bitcoin’s consensus rules to prevent a minority of users from doing things we do not like. The strength of the “no one touches your coins” rule in Bitcoin lies in its categorical nature. If it admits exceptions, even tiny ones, even temporary ones, even just for uses that no one actually engages in, the rule annuls itself. It becomes a guideline with an asterisk. And asterisks, usually, widen.

Whoever blinks first

The second problem is the game theory that Mechanic uses as the activation engine. The logic is this: in soft-forks there is a fundamental asymmetry, ambivalence equals acceptance.

Let me try to explain it with an example. Imagine two large mining pools, Antpool and Foundry. BIP 110 activates. Antpool decides to respect the new rules. Foundry does not, it continues to produce blocks that include things forbidden by the updated clients. All the nodes that apply BIP 110 discard these blocks: for Foundry that means working for free. The rational choice, at that point, is to adapt. And when both pools have adapted, the activation is already halfway there.

It is a correct line of reasoning. But it demonstrates something different from what Mechanic would like to demonstrate. It demonstrates that a determined minority can modify Bitcoin’s rules by leveraging the economic rationality of the miners, not the broad consensus of the community.

Translated: anyone, in the future, who wants to slip new rules inside Bitcoin can use the same playbook. You find a few militant nodes, you convince a minor pool to signal, you force the large pools into the rational choice of adapting so as not to lose blocks. You win. It is exactly the dynamic that Bitcoin’s resistance to change had been designed to prevent. The slippery slope is apolitical: it applies to those who want to block the inscriptions, but it also applies to those who tomorrow will want to freeze the UTXOs that have ended up under OFAC sanctions or “save” the security budget by extending the emission schedule beyond the 21 million.

The wrong cure for the right disease

The third problem is the target. Mechanic, in the interview, lines up several real concerns: the cultural fracture between those who only accumulate and those who do not even run a node, the abuses of certain financial products built on Bitcoin, the institutional drift of the exchanges.

But the therapy has nothing to do with the diagnosis. BIP 110 limits itself to blocking some exotic scripts and to reducing the size of the messages that can be inserted in a transaction. Period. Outside its range of action remain the acceptance of Bitcoin among merchants, the culture of the full node, the concentration of mining (which, with BIP 110, would only get worse), the dependence of the price on the American ETFs.

And on the technical front, Mechanic himself admits that after twelve months the “inscribers” will find other routes. The proof arrived in February: a developer managed to embed a complete image inside Bitcoin with a single transaction, elegantly circumventing all the filters that BIP 110 would like to write at the consensus level. So you pay the price of the precedent in full.

And the rest of the network?

A detail that Mechanic recounts with little generosity: BIP 110 was born as a reaction to Bitcoin Core’s choice to remove, with the October 2025 release, the limit on the messages that can be inserted in transactions in the OP_RETURN field. Core’s reasoning was clear: that limit was already being circumvented for years with worse methods, pretending otherwise was pushing the problem away.

From here two opposite reactions started. The group of Luke Dashjr and Mechanic responded with BIP 110 and with the alternative node Knots that implements it, raising the limit at the consensus level. The rest of the Core ecosystem, and with it a good part of the historic developers, held its ground.

At the level of effective consensus, the gap is embarrassing. SegWit required 95% signaling from the miners. Taproot 90%. BIP 110 would activate at 55% of the miners, or with no miners at all via UASF, with 6-7% of the reachable nodes signaling it. None of the main Core developers has supported it, no big exchange has taken a position, no pool has really committed beyond Ocean.

Mechanic reads this silence as “ambivalence that will flip at the right moment.” I read it as a recognition of the fact that you do not rewrite the rules of a monetary network because there is a jpeg involved.

The gun on the table

There remains the moral point that Mechanic puts at the close: the “nuclear” option. You must always be ready to press the button, he says, referring to the radical fork that would be necessary if the miners ignored BIP 110 and made it fail (which, in all likelihood, will happen).

In a network that depends on the credibility of its own rules, getting used to keeping the gun on the table is already a symptom of the failure of the rules themselves. Bitcoin’s strength, at the time of the Blocksize War, came from the solidity of the social rules that made the option of increasing the block size unfeasible, more than from the material willingness to do the fork. The “plebs” Mechanic talks about, those who refuse to bend, were a bulwark. They were a veto, not an offensive weapon.

The approaching August will tell us who has better understood the nature of the network. Mechanic bets that, faced with the prisoner’s dilemma, everyone will adapt. I bet that those who have endured years of Saylor-mania, two cycles of inscriptions and a handful of proposals for expiration dates on their own UTXOs, will recognize at a glance the game in which the only rational option offered would be to say yes.

To put it in Mechanic’s words: whoever blinks first wins. I have not yet blinked. To put it in my own words, dear readers, sleep soundly.