Michael Saylor’s description of BIP‑110 as dangerous has deepened rifts within the Bitcoin community, leading Arch co‑founder Himanshu Sahay to urge a measured, fact‑based review of the proposal.
Key Takeaways
Michael Saylor condemned BIP-110 as a dangerous precedent of censorship on the Bitcoin network.Critics warn BIP-110 could spark a major network split if miners proceed with activation.Arch CTO Himanshu Sahay urges a dispassionate review of the proposal ahead of its August 2026 flag day.Despite the vocal pushback from the ranks, Saylor’s underlying technical warning appeared to align him with heavyweight veteran cypherpunks, including Blockstream CEO Adam Back and core developers like Greg Maxwell and Peter Todd. They agreed that trying to push BIP-110 via a user-activated soft fork without broad miner consensus was reckless and highly likely to split the network into two competing chains.
A Call for Protocol Agnosticism“Consensus verifies whether a transaction satisfies the protocol’s rules,” Sahay said. “It doesn’t determine whether the underlying use case is financially meaningful or whether someone else considers it spam.”
According to Sahay, this is the reason much of this debate exists outside consensus. While valid, these conversations are different from changing the rules that determine whether a transaction is valid, he added.
