Bitcoin's data cap proposal has almost no miner support. Foundry's default No may finish it.
BIP-110 isn't losing because the idea is obscure. It's losing because its activation path now depends on miners actively overriding silence.
CryptoVibe Desk · bitcoin · mining · protocols
- →Foundry will let mining clients vote on BIP-110, but silent accounts count as No by default.
- →Miner support sits at 0.6% over the past 60 days, according to Jason Hughes's analysis.
- →Watch block 961,632 in early August, when the activation path should be clear or dead.
- BIP → A Bitcoin Improvement Proposal is a formal plan for changing Bitcoin rules or behavior.
- soft fork → A soft fork is a rule change where upgraded users reject some transactions that older users may still accept.
- hashrate → Hashrate means the amount of mining power pointed at Bitcoin.
- OP_RETURN → OP_RETURN is a Bitcoin transaction field often used to store small pieces of data.
BIP-110 is almost out of road. According to Ocean Mining VP Jason Hughes, only 0.6% of Bitcoin blocks signaled support over the past 60 days as of July 17. Node support is also thin, with centralized crawlers showing 7% to 15%. Hughes says his private crawler shows even lower numbers.
The proposal would cap arbitrary non-payment data in Bitcoin transactions. Most new outputs would be limited to 34 bytes. OP_RETURN outputs would go back to an 83-byte cap. Data pushes above 256 bytes would fail.
The code path is simple. The politics are not. BIP-110 turns a policy fight over spam and data storage into a consensus rule. That means some fee-paying transactions could become invalid after activation. If you're holding bitcoin because the base layer is boring, that distinction matters.
Foundry just made the path narrower. Bitcoin Magazine reports that Foundry, which controls roughly one-third of network hashrate, will let clients vote using hashrate-weighted ballots. Foundry starts at No with all blocks. It only flips to Yes if client votes pass 51% of voting hashrate before block 961,632.
Non-responses count as No. That's the catch. This is not a normal poll where apathy sits outside the result. It is closer to a client referendum where every missing answer strengthens the default.
The Segwit comparison is doing real work here. Hughes notes that Segwit entered its user-activated soft fork phase with roughly one-third of hashrate already signaling. BIP-110 is sitting at 0.6%, per his analysis. That is not a weak launch. That is a missing coalition.
Foundry and Antpool are the only pools that can move daily signaling into a meaningful range, per analysts at BGeometrics. One of them now starts against activation unless its own customers force the switch. That makes BIP-110 less a miner vote than a turnout test.
The engineers know the tradeoff. Smaller arbitrary data means less pressure from inscriptions and other non-payment uses. The cost is putting a content rule into consensus. Once Bitcoin starts rejecting transactions for carrying the wrong kind of data, the fight is no longer about mempool policy.
BIP-110 can still pass in theory. In practice, it needs Foundry clients to show up, vote Yes, and do it before early August. For now, the proposal looks functionally dead.
Foundry's choice to count silent clients as No is the decisive action here, because it makes BIP-110 prove active miner demand instead of borrowing pool inertia.
By block 961,632 in early August, watch whether Foundry's client votes pass 51% of voting hashrate and whether total miner signaling rises above 10%.
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