Two of Bitcoin's most recognizable intellectual heavyweights have drawn a sharp line in the sand. Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy and one of the most vocal institutional advocates for Bitcoin, and Adam Back, cryptographer and chief executive of Blockstream whose hashcash algorithm predates Bitcoin itself, have both come out in forceful opposition to BIP-110 — a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal that would formalize or alter the protocol's relationship with Ordinals. Their pushback lands at a peculiar moment: the very use case the proposal centers on has been in retreat for the better part of two years.
What Is BIP-110 and Why Does It Matter?
Bitcoin Improvement Proposals are the formal mechanism through which changes to the Bitcoin protocol are debated, refined, and — if consensus is reached — potentially implemented. BIP-110 enters the arena as a proposal specifically tied to the Ordinals ecosystem, the controversial protocol that enabled the inscription of data, images, and non-fungible token (NFT)-like assets directly onto individual satoshis. Since its emergence, Ordinals has fractured the Bitcoin community along a now-familiar fault line: those who see Bitcoin as a pure monetary network and those who believe its block space is legitimately open to any use the market demands. BIP-110 has reignited that argument at the protocol governance level, which is precisely why the opposition from figures of Saylor and Back's stature carries significant weight.
Why Their Opposition Resonates
Saylor and Back are not fringe critics. They represent two distinct but overlapping pillars of Bitcoin orthodoxy. Saylor approaches Bitcoin as a pristine monetary asset — a digital store of value whose integrity depends on simplicity, predictability, and resistance to feature creep. Any proposal that entrenches non-monetary use cases within the protocol is, from this vantage point, a dilution of Bitcoin's core value proposition. Back, meanwhile, brings deep cryptographic credibility. As the inventor of hashcash, the proof-of-work concept that underlies Bitcoin's consensus mechanism, his voice in technical debates carries a different kind of authority — one rooted in the codebase's intellectual lineage rather than market position alone. When both of these figures align in opposition to a proposal, the Bitcoin development community is compelled to take notice, regardless of where individual contributors stand on the Ordinals question.
The Irony of the Timing
What makes this debate particularly striking is its backdrop. Ordinals transaction activity has undergone a broad and sustained downturn over the last two years. The frenzy that accompanied the protocol's emergence — with inscription volumes spiking, fees surging, and miners briefly celebrating a new revenue stream — has cooled considerably. The cultural moment that made Ordinals a flashpoint, with pixel art collections and Bitcoin-native NFTs commanding real market attention, has faded from the foreground of the industry's conversation. By conventional logic, a declining use case might be expected to produce a declining debate. Instead, BIP-110 has done the opposite: it has formalized and escalated the argument precisely when the real-world activity it concerns has contracted.
This is not entirely surprising. Protocol governance debates in Bitcoin often operate on a different timeline than market trends. The concern among Bitcoin conservatives is not necessarily about the current volume of Ordinals transactions — it is about what enshrining related mechanisms at the protocol level could mean for Bitcoin's architecture and social contract over the long term. A use case does not have to be thriving to set a dangerous precedent, in their view. The fight over BIP-110 is therefore less about the present state of the Ordinals market and more about the kind of Bitcoin that emerges from this decade's governance decisions.
The Broader Governance Stakes
Bitcoin's development culture has always prized conservative incrementalism. Changes to the base layer are extraordinarily difficult to push through, by design. The resistance from Saylor and Back plugs into a broader instinct within the Bitcoin community to treat any new proposal touching the base layer with deep suspicion. Ordinals itself was never the result of a protocol change — it exploited existing functionality introduced by the Taproot upgrade — which is part of what made it so contentious. BIP-110 attempts to address the Ordinals ecosystem through a more deliberate governance path, but that formalization is itself the problem for its critics. To accept BIP-110 is, in their framing, to legitimize a class of use that many Bitcoin maximalists believe undermines the network's monetary mission.
What This Means
The opposition of two figures as prominent as Michael Saylor and Adam Back does not automatically doom BIP-110 — Bitcoin's improvement process is deliberately resistant to top-down authority, and no individual voice commands veto power. But their alignment sends a strong signal to node operators, miners, and developers who look to these figures for ideological orientation. With Ordinals activity already in decline, proponents of BIP-110 now face a compounded challenge: they must argue for the relevance of a proposal tied to a cooling market while simultaneously overcoming the philosophical opposition of some of Bitcoin's most influential voices. The debate over what Bitcoin is for — and what changes it should absorb — is far from settled, and BIP-110 has become its latest, and most formalized, battleground.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Bitcoin News.