George Bodin Makes His Case For BIP-110 As Bitcoin's Spam Fight Nears A Deadline
Bitcoin's community has spent the past year arguing over seven lines in a proposal that most of its backers insist is not radical. George Bodin came on the show to make the case for BIP-110, and to explain why he thinks the fight matters more than the technical details suggest.
WHAT BIP-110 ACTUALLY DOES
BIP-110, formally titled the Reduced Data Temporary Soft Fork, is basically a fight over what Bitcoin block space is for, and would temporarily tighten the paths used to store non-financial data on the network for one year, capping OP_RETURN at its old small size, blocking most arbitrary data chunks above 256 bytes, and restricting some script formats used mainly for data storage. Bodin's framing on the show was blunt: Bitcoin is money first, and anything that treats block space as free storage for images, tokens, or arbitrary files works against that. He said transactions previously written to the chain are grandfathered in, so the change does not touch anyone's existing coins or history.
WHY HE BACKS IT ANYWAY, EVEN AS A "TEMPORARY" MEASURE
The host pushed Bodin on the word "temporary," pointing out that temporary government measures have a habit of becoming permanent. Bodin's answer was that this is not a government program: the rule is written to expire on its own after roughly a year unless the community deliberately extends it, and if something needs fixing before then, node operators can fix it. When the temporary soft fork expires, the restrictions would stop unless another proposal extended them.
WHERE ACTIVATION ACTUALLY STANDS
The mechanics matter here because BIP-110 does not depend on miners agreeing to it in the traditional sense. It uses a user-activated soft fork, a mechanism in which nodes enforce a rule whether or not miners agree, set to a 55% miner-signaling threshold rather than the traditional 95%, and backing has been absent even at that lower bar. Miner signaling passed 1% for the first time in late July after OCEAN began signaling by default, while a mandatory signaling window opening around block 961,632 forces the issue in the second week of August, with lock-in following no later than block 963,648 and activation projected near September 6, 2026. On node adoption specifically, adoption sits in the low single digits among nodes that store and relay the chain, carried almost entirely by Bitcoin Knots. Bodin put his own estimate of Knots usage at around 18 to 20% of the network, up from roughly 1% a year ago, and argued that is a real, fast-growing movement rather than a fringe position.
THE ONE THING HE ADMITS IS A PROBLEM
Bodin did not use his time on the show purely to defend BIP-110. He raised his own concern with the Knots side of the fight: the developer base behind the Knots implementation he runs is too concentrated, and he said he was hoping for a genuinely independent alternative to emerge that has not yet materialized. His conclusion was that win or lose on BIP-110, the community still needs to fix that concentration problem if it wants to avoid trading one point of centralized control for another.
WHAT HAPPENS IF IT FAILS
Bodin was equally direct about what a failed activation would mean. If BIP-110 does not lock in, he said it would show that node runners do not currently have the leverage some believed they had, and the community would need to do a genuine post-mortem on why consensus never formed rather than treating the outcome as a betrayal. He was clear that a failure would not push him out of Bitcoin. The concrete marker to watch is the mandatory signaling window opening in early August: once that window passes, enforcing nodes will apply the rule regardless of whether miners ever signal for it.
This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.
