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BIP-110 Activation Frozen After Coldcard Exploit: Is the Soft Fork Dead?

BIP-110 Activation Frozen After Coldcard Exploit: Is the Soft Fork Dead?

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The developers pushing Bitcoin’s BIP-110 rule change have called off its launch. They blamed the industry response to a Coldcard wallet flaw that left user funds easier to steal.

Udi Wertheimer announced the delay, urging anyone running BIP-110 software to switch back to a normal Bitcoin (BTC) node. He gave no new date.

Why BIP-110 Activation Was Paused

BIP-110 is a temporary rule change, known as a soft fork. It would limit how much data people can pack into Bitcoin transactions.

Supporters say that data crowds out ordinary payments. Critics say Bitcoin should not police what users store.

The limits would last one year. Developer Dathon Ohm wrote the rules, and Bitcoin Knots software ships them.

Miners started voting on December 1, 2025. The Bitcoin blockspace spam debate had already split the community.

Then a separate problem landed.

Coinkite disclosed the bug on July 30. Its COLDCARD wallets built seed phrases, the master key behind a wallet, using far less randomness than promised. Roughly 72 bits instead of 128.

That gap makes a seed vastly easier to guess. Wallets running firmware released since March 2021 were hit hardest.

Updating the device does not fix a seed it already made. Coinkite is telling owners to move their money.

Thieves had already drained wallets tied to the flaw. The company has not said how much was lost.

Wertheimer called the delay a matter of timing, not doubt.

“…due to the coldcard incident, BIP-110 community leaders have decided to DELAY ACTIVATION. a new activation date will be announced at a later time,” he wrote.

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The Math Was Already Settled

Miners back a rule change by flagging their blocks. BIP-110 needed 55% of blocks in a two-week stretch. That means 1,109 blocks. The live monitor counted 30.

BIP-110 Monitor. Source: BIP110Monitor.com
BIP-110 Monitor. Source: BIP110Monitor.com

That is 2.63% of 1,068 blocks mined this period. It is the best BIP-110 has ever managed. It is still more than 20 times short.

Every earlier two-week stretch since December finished below 1.3%. Only 948 blocks are left. Even if every one voted yes, the total would reach about 48%. It could not pass this round.

That was already true days before anyone announced a delay.

Michael Saylor has warned about Bitcoin neutrality for weeks. He says almost every yes vote comes from one mining pool. Blockstream chief executive Adam Back has flagged chain split risk, calling the 55% bar too low to be safe.

A second phase was due at block 961,632, about six days away. It would reject any block that did not vote yes.

Nodes still running BIP-110 would enforce that on their own. That is why the warning to switch back matters.

No one owns Bitcoin’s rules. Nobody can flip a switch to start or stop a soft fork. This was a request, not a command.

Whether operators listen will say more about BIP-110’s support than any vote counter has.

The post BIP-110 Activation Frozen After Coldcard Exploit: Is the Soft Fork Dead? appeared first on BeInCrypto.

Michael Saylor Says Bitcoin Has Won, So Why Did MicroStrategy Stop Buying BTC?

Michael Saylor Says Bitcoin Has Won, So Why Did MicroStrategy Stop Buying BTC?

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Michael Saylor said on Tuesday that Bitcoin has won, and that its gravest danger now comes from within its own ranks. His company, Strategy, has not bought a single BTC in five consecutive weeks.

Blockchain intelligence firm Arkham dissected the pause. Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) has built a $3.75 billion cash reserve instead. Two clocks are now running at once, and they point in opposite directions.

Why Michael Saylor Is Warning About Bitcoin Now

The timing is not accidental. BIP-110 is a proposed one-year soft fork that would cap the size of arbitrary data fields in Bitcoin transactions. Written by developer Dathon Ohm and shipped in Bitcoin Knots, it began miner signaling on December 1, 2025.

Miners have largely ignored it. That does not stop it.

The proposal’s own deployment schedule sets a mandatory lock-in window for around August 2026. Once that window opens, blocks that fail to signal are rejected as invalid. Lock-in becomes guaranteed. Activation follows two weeks later, and the rules expire on their own about a year after that.

In other words, Saylor is not arguing against something that needs to win a vote. He is arguing against something with a calendar. That window is days away.

What Saylor Actually Said About Consensus Rules

The Strategy executive chairman framed Bitcoin’s consensus rules as a constitution. They define property, scarcity, settlement, and power. Rewriting them to suit any faction, he argued, attacks every participant alive today and every one who comes later.

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He named three targets:

  • BIP-110 censors valid fee-paying transactions in his reading.
  • Covenants create fresh attack surface.
  • Larger blocks thin out blockspace scarcity and raise validation costs.

His central technical claim concerns miner revenue. Block subsidies halve every 210,000 blocks. Fees must therefore carry more of the security budget over time. Weakening the fee market, he said, disarms the network.

The other side of this argument is well staffed. BIP-110’s backers say arbitrary data embedding burdens node operators and crowds out payments.

Saylor is not the only critic, and critics do not agree with each other. Blockstream chief executive Adam Back also opposes the proposal. His fork risk warning targeted the lowered 55% activation threshold, not censorship.

Saylor’s earlier BIP-110 warning called the proposal Bitcoin’s biggest self-inflicted risk. The dispute has split Bitcoin developers for months.

Why Did Strategy Stop Buying Bitcoin?

Because equity became cheaper to sell than conviction was to abandon.

A Form 8-K filing dated July 27 confirmed a $525 million addition to the dollar reserve. The total reached $3.75 billion, which the company frames as 2.1 years of dividend coverage against roughly $1.76 billion in annual preferred obligations.

The money came from shares, not coins. Strategy sold $544.5 million of MSTR stock last week. Roughly $467 million and $263.5 million came from share sales in the two weeks before that, or about $1.26 billion across three weeks.

It sold those shares cheap. MSTR trades near $96.66, down about 76% from its 52-week high of $414.36. Every dollar raised this way costs far more equity than it would have a year ago.

MSTR Stock Performance. Source: Google Finance
MSTR Stock Performance. Source: Google Finance

How Far Behind Is the 1 Million BTC Target?

Strategy has said it wants 1 million BTC by the end of 2026. It holds 843,775. The gap is 156,225 BTC.

About 22 weeks remain in the year. Closing the gap would require roughly 7,000 BTC per week, or near $447 million weekly at current prices. The company is buying none.

MicroStrategy's plan versus its current position
MicroStrategy’s plan versus its current position

Why It Matters for BTC and MSTR Holders

Strategy’s average cost sits near $75,494 per coin. Bitcoin trades around $63,817, down roughly 1.5% over 24 hours and about 49% below its October 2025 peak of $126,080. That leaves the stack close to $9.9 billion underwater on paper.

BTC would need to climb about 18% to return the position to break-even. The Bitcoin price today gives that no help.

Bitcoin (BTC) Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
Bitcoin (BTC) Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto

The preferred shares explain the urgency. STRC trades near $88.86, still about 11% below its $100 par despite a dividend raised to 12% on July 1 and an authorized buyback programme.

That pressure on STRC shaped the Digital Credit Capital Framework announced on June 29, which cleared buybacks and up to $1.25 billion of Bitcoin sales.

What to Watch Over the Next 30 Days

Three dated events sit inside the window.

  • BIP-110’s mandatory signaling window is expected to open in August, which would guarantee lock-in regardless of miner support.
  • Strategy files weekly. A sixth consecutive week without a purchase would extend the longest pause of its accumulation era.
  • With $3.75 billion banked, the company has removed the near-term need to touch its $1.25 billion Bitcoin monetization authorization.
Strategy BTC holdings versus USD reserve, weekly, 2026, Source: BeInCrypto
Strategy BTC holdings versus USD reserve, weekly, 2026, Source: BeInCrypto

Both positions can hold at once. One defends a protocol meant to last a century. The other has to fund a dividend next quarter. The tension is not hypocrisy so much as a scheduling problem, and the schedule is about to get crowded.

The post Michael Saylor Says Bitcoin Has Won, So Why Did MicroStrategy Stop Buying BTC? appeared first on BeInCrypto.

A 12-Year-Old Bitcoin Dispute Returns as BIP-110 Divides the Community

A 12-Year-Old Bitcoin Dispute Returns as BIP-110 Divides the Community

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Nakamoto CEO David Bailey has resurfaced a 2014 controversy involving developer Luke Dashjr. He argues the record disqualifies Dashjr from steering Bitcoin (BTC) as the BIP-110 fight intensifies.

The claim revives a dispute over blacklists Dashjr once built into a version of Bitcoin’s software. It resurfaces as he backs BIP-110, his proposed one-year ban on storing images and other non-money data on Bitcoin.

Bailey Points to a 12-Year-Old Blacklisting Incident

On Friday, Bailey wrote that Dashjr secretly added Bitcoin address blacklists to the Gentoo Linux package he maintained in 2014.

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The 2014 patch shipped on by default, blocking payments to gambling services such as SatoshiDice from the Gentoo build of Bitcoin software. Node operators noticed only when transactions failed, and the backlash filled a widely shared thread.

Even then, a fellow Core developer said such changes belonged in a separately named version, not the default software.

Supporters stress the context. Dashjr reversed the default, made it optional, and apologized, and Bitcoin Core never shipped the blacklists. That same developer now drives Bitcoin’s anti-spam rule change.

BIP-110 Turns an Old Dispute Into a Trust Test

The rule targets Ordinals inscriptions, the images and text people embed on Bitcoin, which backers call spam. Dashjr runs Bitcoin Knots, an alternative version of the software that already enforces the limit.

Knots powered about a fifth of the network’s public computers, known as nodes, during 2025’s spam fight, data shows. He calls the fight existential, warning Bitcoin fails if the proposal fails.

Bitcoin Nodes
Bitcoin Nodes. Source: Coin.Dance

Miners can back the change by flagging the blocks they mine. BIP-110 needs 55% of them, below Bitcoin’s usual 95% bar. Yet support has stayed under 1% since December 2025, never topping 0.79%.

Even so, computers running the software plan to reject any block that withholds support from early August. The move echoes 2017, when users forced an upgrade called SegWit the same way. That push carried broad market backing. BIP-110 does not.

Prominent voices oppose the plan. MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor called it a self-inflicted protocol risk. Blockstream’s Adam Back warned of fork risk that could strand supporters on a separate chain.

Bailey also argued that Wall Street misjudges the stakes. If the network ever split, he asked, which side would the cash-settled futures on the CME exchange treat as the real Bitcoin?

“very clear to me the Wall Street universe has no idea how Bitcoin governance works. Like which chaintip does a cash settled Bitcoin future traded on the CME settle against? Whether TradFi like it or not, they’re locked in the insane asylum with all of us,” Bailey added.

Bitcoin’s market value sits near $1.3 trillion. Critics say that trillion-dollar market value should not hinge on one developer’s preferences.

Dashjr is not Bitcoin Core’s sole maintainer, a role shared among several contributors. His direct influence runs through Knots and the people who run it.

The activation window opens in early August. Back has dismissed that deadline as the road to a minority altcoin, a small spinoff few would follow. The 2014 fight now stands in for a bigger question, who gets to shape Bitcoin.

The post A 12-Year-Old Bitcoin Dispute Returns as BIP-110 Divides the Community appeared first on BeInCrypto.

Bitcoin Developers are Fighting Over What the Blockchain is For

Bitcoin Developers are Fighting Over What the Blockchain is For

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Ordinals developers say their technology will survive BIP-110, a proposed rule change that aims to stop people from storing files on Bitcoin. The fight comes down to one question. Should Bitcoin (BTC) handle only money, or anything users pay for?

Inscriptions let people store images and text on the Bitcoin blockchain, similar to NFTs. BIP-110 would block most of that data for one year. Supporters call it spam, while critics say Bitcoin should stay open to everyone.

What Would BIP-110 Change for Bitcoin?

Every Bitcoin transaction can carry a little extra data, and inscriptions use that space to store pictures and messages forever. The proposal would shrink the allowed space to 256 bytes per piece, about one short paragraph of text.

That limit would break the storage method inscriptions use today. The rule would last for one year, then switch off automatically, and old coins would not be affected.

Its author, who writes under the pen name Dathon Ohm, credits Bitcoin Knots maintainer Luke Dashjr for the first draft.

Miners vote by adding a small flag to the blocks they mine. The plan needs 1,109 flagged blocks out of 2,016 in a two-week window. However, the public monitor counted just three flagged blocks as of June 30, under 1%.

BIP-110 miner signaling chart showing 0.73% support versus the 55% activation threshold, alt text "BIP-110 signaling status", Source: bip110.org monitor]
BIP-110 miner signaling chart showing 0.73% support versus the 55% activation threshold, alt text “BIP-110 signaling status”, Source: bip110.org monitor

Support has never passed 1% since voting opened in December 2025. The best two-week stretch reached 0.79% in mid-June.

Here is the twist. The plan does not need a majority to activate. From around early August, computers running the BIP-110 software will reject blocks that do not carry the flag.

Blockstream CEO Adam Back has warned of fork risk, meaning Bitcoin could split into two competing versions. MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor called the plan a self-inflicted risk.

Dashjr, for his part, framed the stakes as existential on Thursday.

“If BIP110 fails, Bitcoin fails with it. I am not interested in any CBDC, much less an unregulated CBDC pretending to be decentralised,” he wrote.

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A CBDC is a government-issued digital currency. In his view, a Bitcoin that cannot reject spam loses what makes it different.

Ordinals Developers Say They Are Ready

On July 2, Ordinals developer lifofifoX published a fix that stores data in a new way. It cuts files into small, allowed pieces instead of using the method that BIP-110 bans. In short, inscriptions would keep working even if the rule passes.

Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor approved the fix the same day.

“Looks good to me! Let’s wait until BIP-110 activates to merge this,” Rodarmor wrote on GitHub.

The other side has already hit back, filing a counter-update to Bitcoin Knots, the software most BIP-110 supporters run. He argues the software simply does not notice the new format, letting it slip past the size checks.

The back-and-forth echoes an earlier inscription debate that also split the community.

Money sits at the center of the fight. In October 2024, Runes, a similar data-based format, drove a 32% fee increase that paid miners.

In contrast, supporters say the volunteers who run Bitcoin’s network computers must store all that data forever and get nothing for it.

The forced voting phase is about five weeks away. Back has already dismissed the August deadline as a path to a minority altcoin, a spinoff coin few would follow.

The coming weeks will show whether the miner’s silence means opposition or indifference.

The post Bitcoin Developers are Fighting Over What the Blockchain is For appeared first on BeInCrypto.