BIP-110
What Is BIP-110?
BIP-110 was a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) authored by Dathon Ohm and assigned in December 2025. The proposal sought to address a debate intensified by the rise of Bitcoin Ordinals and Bitcoin Runes: whether Bitcoin’s block space belongs to financial transactions or to arbitrary data storage.
Due to limited participation from miners, the chain that BIP-110 produced stalled after only two blocks.
What Would BIP-110 Have Changed?
For one year, BIP-110 would have placed strict size limits on certain parts of Bitcoin transactions, specifically the parts that protocols like Ordinals use to embed data. These limits would have been enforced at the network level, meaning nodes would have rejected blocks containing transactions that exceeded them rather than merely flagging them as non-standard.
Among the rules: scripts controlling where coins are sent could be no larger than 34 bytes in most cases; data chunks pushed during script execution could be no larger than 256 bytes; and the Taproot-specific structures used by advanced smart contract protocols would have been capped in size and complexity.
Coins held before the rules took effect would not have been affected. The proposal acknowledged one exception: in rare cases, funds locked in pre-signed Taproot transactions could theoretically have been frozen during the one-year window if the transaction’s spending conditions all fell under the new limits and no fallback existed.
Why Did BIP-110 Generate Controversy?
Supporters argued that using Bitcoin transactions to store data rather than transfer value inflates fees and bloats the records every node must keep, making Bitcoin more expensive to use and harder to run as a full node.
Critics worried about the collateral damage. Protocols like BitVM use complex transaction structures that BIP-110 would have broken. Some standard wallet software also generates transaction formats that the proposal would have temporarily invalidated, creating risk for ordinary users during the one-year window.
