Michael Saylor just released 110 reasons why BIP-110 is a 'bad idea.' But I have one question for the Bitcoin maximalist: when was the last time you audited a single line of Bitcoin Core code?
Saylor, the executive chairman of MicroStrategy and the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, took to social media last week to issue a sweeping condemnation of the proposed soft fork. The post, which he titled '110 Reasons Against BIP-110,' lacks any technical depth or references to specific code changes. It reads more like a political manifesto than a technical review. As someone who spent four months independently verifying Zilliqa’s Nakamoto Consensus implementation in 2017—catching a shard collision edge-case that the team missed—I know the difference between a genuine audit and a public relations stunt.
Context: The BIP-110 Black Box
BIP-110, or Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110, is a soft fork upgrade that has been floating around Bitcoin’s development circles for months. Its exact technical specifications remain unpublished—or at least, they are not part of the public discourse surrounding Saylor's attack. What we do know is that it involves changes to the protocol layer that affect transaction validation rules. Soft forks are backward-compatible by design, but they can alter miner incentives, transaction fee structures, and even block size parameters. Historically, any proposal that touches these levers triggers a tribal war within the Bitcoin community, and Saylor is positioning himself as the champion of the conservative faction.
But here is the problem: Saylor is not a software engineer, nor is he a core contributor to Bitcoin's codebase. He is a corporate executive with a massive financial stake in Bitcoin’s status quo. His 110-point list was met with applause from the 'HODL-at-all-costs' crowd but with skepticism from the handful of developers who actually review every line of the Bitcoin Core repository. Why? Because not a single one of those 110 points contained a verifiable technical claim.
Core: The Technical Vacuum and the Danger of Influence Without Audits
Let me be clear: I am not defending BIP-110. I cannot defend it because I have not seen the code. Neither has Saylor, apparently. He claimed the upgrade 'causes more harm than the problems it solves,' but failed to provide even one reproducible example. This is not how rigorous technical debate works. During the DeFi Summer of 2020, I audited MakerDAO’s V2 migration logic and identified a potential oracle manipulation vector in the KNC feed. I published a full risk assessment that modeled liquidation cascades. The team responded by adjusting collateral thresholds. That is how you influence protocol design—with data, not with spin.
Saylor’s opposition is reminiscent of the 2017 Bitcoin Cash fork, when Bitmain’s Jihan Wu and other mining interests pushed for larger blocks. The debate was messy, emotional, and ultimately split the community. Now, Saylor is attempting to preempt a similar split by using his reputation as a Bitcoin 'whale' to kill a proposal before it even enters formal review. This is governance theater, not technical diligence. Audit the code, not the pitch.
What could BIP-110 actually contain? Based on the pattern of past soft fork proposals, it likely involves changes to the transaction fee market or block size parameters. Saylor’s 110 points probably include warnings about increased mining centralization, reduced node count, and potential censorship—all valid concerns in theory. But without concrete evidence that BIP-110 triggers these outcomes, his arguments remain hypothetical.
Consider the Terra/Luna collapse in 2022. I spent six months modeling UST’s death spiral mechanics before it happened, exposing the circular dependency in its seigniorage model. My analysis was validated by on-chain data. If Saylor had applied that same forensic rigor to BIP-110, he would have published a technical paper, not a Twitter thread. Complexity hides risk. Saylor is using the complexity of his 110-point list to mask the absence of substance.
Contrarian: What If He’s Right—But for the Wrong Reasons?
Now, let me play contrarian. Saylor’s opposition may still be correct in broad strokes. Soft forks are risky. They require broad consensus among miners, node operators, and developers. If BIP-110 introduces non-trivial economic changes, it could destabilize Bitcoin’s incentive structure. In a bull market—which we are currently in—many projects rush upgrades that later prove flawed. I saw this with the NFT utility hype in 2021: Bored Ape Yacht Club’s smart contract was technically elegant but had zero real utility beyond speculation. I wrote a scathing deconstruction based on gas inefficiencies and centralized metadata storage. The market took years to agree with me.
Similarly, Saylor’s conservatism aligns with the 'don’t break Bitcoin' ethos. But the method matters. By skipping technical analysis and appealing directly to his followers, he is undermining the very culture of decentralized decision-making that makes Bitcoin resilient. If a proposal is truly dangerous, show the murder weapon. Code does not lie, people do.
Takeaway: Demand Transparency, Not Tribalism
The real takeaway from this episode is not whether BIP-110 is good or bad—it is that the Bitcoin community has a governance problem. When a single whale can dominate the narrative without providing technical evidence, the protocol becomes vulnerable to social attacks rather than cryptographic ones. Every stakeholder should demand to see the actual pull request. Read the diff. Test the assumptions. Do your own math, not your own fear.
If BIP-110 is as harmful as Saylor claims, let the code speak. Otherwise, these 110 points are just noise—and noise in a bull market has a way of turning into FUD that hurts everyone.