• The Motivation: The “Spam” War
• Protecting the Monetary Core
• How BIP-110 Works
• How to Activate?

BIP-110 (also known as the “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork”) is a recent proposed upgrade to the Bitcoin network. Put forward by developer Dathon Ohm and supported by the Bitcoin Knots community (including Luke Dashjr), its primary goal is to filter out arbitrary data - such as Ordinals, Inscriptions, and BRC-20 tokens - from the Bitcoin blockchain.

Here is a breakdown of why it was proposed and how it works…

§The Motivation: The “Spam” War

Since the explosion of Ordinals in 2023, users have been using Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade to embed images, text, and other non-financial data directly into the blockchain. This has led to higher transaction fees and increased storage requirements for people running Bitcoin nodes.

The debate reached a boiling point recently with the release of Bitcoin Core version 30, where developers removed the long-standing 83-byte default limit on OP_RETURN data. In response to this, the ethical developers - who believe Bitcoin should strictly be used for financial transactions - proposed BIP-110 to forcefully block spam at the consensus level.

§Protecting the Monetary Core

BIP-110 proponents argue, correctly, that the Bitcoin network is currently under a spam attack that degrades its primary use case: being a decentralized, incorruptible, peer-to-peer financial network. How does BIP-110 help?

• Lower Financial Transaction Fees: Currently, regular users sending Bitcoin payments have to compete for block space with people embedding large image files or BRC-20 tokens. By stopping this arbitrary data, fees for standard financial transactions would drop, making Bitcoin a more usable currency for everyday transfers.

• Protecting Node Decentralization: To keep Bitcoin’s monetary policy secure (such as enforcing the 21 million supply cap), it must be incredibly easy and cheap for average people to run a validating node. If the blockchain becomes bloated with heavy multimedia files, the storage and computing requirements to run a node will skyrocket. This could centralize the network into the hands of a few large data centers, weakening the trustless nature of the money.

• Fixing Unfair Subsidies: Because of how Bitcoin’s SegWit upgrade was designed, “witness data” (where these images and tokens are stored) receives a massive fee discount. This creates an unnatural economic environment where storing a 1MB image is cheaper than sending a complex monetary transaction of the same size. BIP-110 aims to force low-value data out, restoring the focus to high-value financial transfers.

§How BIP-110 Works

Instead of a permanent change, BIP-110 is a temporary, one-year soft fork. It introduces seven new consensus rules to restrict how much data can be pushed into a transaction.

The key technical restrictions include:

• Strict Data Caps: It invalidates any method of embedding contiguous arbitrary data larger than 256 bytes.

• Capping OP_RETURN: It forcefully limits OP_RETURN (the specific script code designed to hold small amounts of non-financial data) back to a maximum of 83 bytes.

• Output Limits: It restricts the size of transaction outputs to 34 bytes and limits certain scriptPubKey and Tapleaf formats that are frequently used for data embedding.

• UASF Activation: It relies on a User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) with a relatively low 55% miner signaling threshold for activation.

§How to Activate?

Download and install it here:

https://github.com/dathonohm/bitcoin/releases/tag/v29.3.knots20260210%2Bbip110-v0.3