Foundry asked miners to vote on restricting Bitcoin data. The default is No, which makes activation harder than it looks.
Default-No means every miner who doesn't vote counts as a vote against. With activation tied to block 961,632 in early August, the clock is running on a process that's already tilted.
CryptoVibe Desk · bitcoin · bip-110 · mining
- →Foundry just opened a hashrate-weighted miner vote on BIP-110, a soft fork that would cap non-monetary data on the Bitcoin blockchain.
- →Foundry defaults to No, so every non-responding miner structurally votes against BIP-110, making the 51% flip threshold much harder than the numbers suggest.
- →If Foundry's Yes votes don't hit 51% before block 961,632 in early August, BIP-110 loses its largest signaling source.
- soft fork → A Bitcoin upgrade that tightens the rules without breaking backward compatibility, so old nodes still follow the chain but won't enforce the new restrictions.
- OP_RETURN → A Bitcoin transaction field designed for storing small amounts of non-payment data on-chain; BIP-110 would restore a stricter byte cap on how much data can go there.
- hashrate → The total computing power used to mine Bitcoin; a mining pool's hashrate share tells you what fraction of new blocks it typically produces.
- signaling → A mechanism where miners include a flag in the blocks they produce to show support for a proposed upgrade, used to measure whether there is enough consensus to activate it.
Foundry just opened a miner vote on BIP-110. The proposal would restrict how much non-monetary data can live on the Bitcoin blockchain.
The rules, per Bitcoin Magazine: most new outputs capped at 34 bytes, OP_RETURN restored to 83 bytes, data pushes above 256 bytes rejected. Proponents call it a return to Bitcoin as peer-to-peer money. Opponents, including Michael Saylor and Adam Back, say it converts a policy dispute into a consensus rule that could reject transactions already paying fees.
The mechanism matters more than the debate. Foundry's default position is No. Non-responding accounts count as No. The pool only flips to Yes if 51% of voting hashrate actively submits a Yes ballot. Silence is a No vote.
Foundry controls roughly one-third of network hashrate, Bitcoin Magazine reports. BGeometrics identified Foundry and Antpool as the two pools whose decisions can push daily signaling into a meaningful range. If Foundry's miners stay quiet, one-third of global hashrate defaults to opposition. That's the catch.
This is an inertia problem, not a consensus problem. Most signaling designs treat non-participation as neutral. You're not adding weight to either side. Default-No flips that.
Getting a supermajority of active Yes ballots from thousands of individual mining clients is harder than the 51% flip threshold implies. The denominator isn't all of Foundry's hashrate. It's the share that actually votes.
What Foundry's design measures is enthusiasm for BIP-110, not neutrality toward it. A miner who hasn't heard of BIP-110 counts the same as one who actively opposes it. The ballot treats non-engagement and opposition identically, and aggregate results won't show the difference.
Activation ties to block 961,632, projected for early August. The measurement window ran July 6 through July 15. Votes stay confidential at the individual level; aggregate results may be published.
If you're a miner in Foundry's pool and you want this fork to signal Yes, you need to actively vote. The pool's own default is working against you.
Foundry's decision to default to No rather than abstain puts its thumb on the scale. The pool controls one-third of global hashrate, and the engineers who designed this ballot are well aware of the effect.
If Foundry's aggregate Yes votes don't cross 51% of voting hashrate before block 961,632 in early August, BIP-110 has effectively stalled as a soft fork candidate.
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