BIP-110 Failure Shows Bitcoin’s Origins Defy Replication

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110, or BIP-110, sought a one-year temporary soft fork to curb arbitrary, non-payment data at the consensus layer, including Ordinals-style inscriptions. The dispute mattered because Bitcoin has no central authority to approve upgrades: miners, node operators, developers and businesses must coordinate around shared rules. Giacomo Zucco, director of Plan ₿ Network, said the episode illustrates why copying Bitcoin’s code cannot reproduce the social consensus, incentives and network effects built since its 2009 launch.

That coordination failed when BIP-110’s mandatory signaling window began at block 961,632 on Aug. 8, 2026. Miner support reached only about 2.53%, far below the proposal’s 55% lock-in threshold, and the minority branch produced just two blocks before stalling while the main Bitcoin chain continued. Zucco said the result shows that Bitcoin’s formative conditions — when the network had little monetary value and participants could experiment with lower stakes — are effectively unavailable today, making a faithful replay of its early development “almost impossible.”