In 2017, a large part of the bitcoin community rallied behind BIP148 and a User Activated Soft Fork to force a popular upgrade (SegWit) to bitcoin when miners dragged their feet after the New York Agreement (signed while I was in prison)
It increased the block size without increasing their profits. The understanding was that an agreement would remove the negative cloud over the development stall in bitcoin during the 2014-2017 bear market.
At first just a fringe group of Bitcoin developers and community members, they turned “UASF” into a credible threat: nodes and economic actors could coordinate to orphan non‑compliant miners, flipping the old assumption that hash power alone decides Bitcoin’s future.
It was popular because SegWit had broad dev support, strong economic backing, and a clear technical upside in capacity, malleability fixes, and upgradeability. This would trigger a bull market, miners would make more money even if blocks weren’t actually bigger.
But the miners wanted to hold out for actual bigger blocks. Bigger blocks = more transaction fees. The issue is that bigger blocks could also lead to centralization and the demise of bitcoin.
In 2017 the bluff was called and SegWit was activated. The bitcoin exchanges saved the day by announcing they wouldn’t follow a chain with larger blocks and call it “bitcoin”
Checkmate.
BIP110 is trying to reuse the same weapon in a very different environment. Instead of activating a long‑planned upgrade, it’s a one‑year soft fork to restrict arbitrary data (inscriptions, images, etc.) to “protect Bitcoin as money.”
The problem: the consensus picture is nothing like 2017. Miners aren’t on board in size, exchanges and big custodians are quiet, and a non‑trivial share of users actually want permissionless use of block space, even for things old‑school Bitcoiners call spam.
BIP110 looks more like one faction using the UASF playbook to impose its policy preferences on a divided community.
2/ "If BIP148 fails, many of us will be splitting off to a new altcoin with another PoW algorithm. " - Quote by
@LukeDashjr