Bitcoin’s Biggest THREAT Is Coming From Within | Is BIP-110 the Breaking Point? | Bitcoin Simply

**Dante Cook** (0:00)
Bitcoin may change forever, in just 25 days. And the threat isn't coming from the US government, China, a 51% attack, or quantum computers. It's coming from inside the Bitcoin community itself. There are two camps of Bitcoiners fighting about BIP 110, the monetary maximalists and the consensus purists. And as a result, Bitcoin might split into two chains. A fight that was happening in the background has suddenly exploded and come to the main stage. Everyone has an opinion. Even Michael Saylor, who stayed silent on Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Development Conversations thus far. He called it the Bitcoin Latrogenic Proposal, hinting at the fact that we might be hurting something that's working fine, as it is. This show is called Bitcoin Simply, and so my goal is to highlight some high level points and point you to resources so you can dive deeper on the topic. Hopefully by the end of the video, you'll understand why Block 961,632 matters so much to the future of Bitcoin. Why a number is so small as 0.6% can still flip the whole board, and why this has already happened to Bitcoin before, and it's going to make it stronger. This is Dante Cook of Bitcoin Simply.
Let's go.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:13)
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you said something along the lines of like, you feel like Bitcoin 10 is doomed to fail basically, or like you don't think it's going to actually work. Why is that?

**Samson Mao** (1:23)
Well, it doesn't have consensus. So there are a lot of comparisons to the block size wars and activation of Segwit, but there was major consensus that Segwit was the path forward for the network to fix the malleability bug and to enable Lightning.
And it was just a few people blocking it for financial gain, personal gain, ASIC boost. And it was really more about the activation mechanism and activation timeline over the change itself. Whereas 110 and everything, it does not have consensus, especially amongst the technical development experts, you know, people that actually work on the software.
And even outside of that, there are a lot of ordinary people using Bitcoin that don't agree with it either. So it's a very small group of people that really want to push this forward. And they can be very aggressive and nasty. So it's not a good combination for building consensus. And that is exactly what you need to do to get change in Bitcoin. But all of the technical arguments aside, I go back to, you should not be forced to need to worry about something urgently for Bitcoin. Like, that's just not the case. Right now, 110 is popular, it's fashionable, people are rallying. A small group of people are rallying behind it. And I'll get blasted for everything I've said here, because if you're not on their side, you're their enemy.

**Dante Cook** (2:55)
Before we go any further into BIP 110, what it is, these fights that are happening online, that was a commentary from an interview from Samson Mao, who's fighting publicly with people like Luke Dash Jr., Bitcoin Mechanic, Matthew Cratter and others who are influential in Bitcoin circles. The drama surrounding this and why so many people are coming out vocally is that in just 25 days, roughly, around Block 961,632, there could be a signal to introduce a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 And this all arose from some things that happened in October of 2025, when Bitcoin Core developers introduced a new version of Bitcoin, Core version 30, where the OP return data field that was capped at 83 bytes for over a decade is suddenly raised to 100,000. A few months ago, nobody deep in Bitcoin even knew what an OP return was. They thought it was just millennials talking about their enemies, a new word OP, that's my OP. They had no idea what a freaking OP return was, but now it's front and center because people are now starting to look at what's actually happening on chain and what's impacting nodes. Images, tokens, files, things that are not necessarily money are being stored on the Bitcoin blockchain forever. And this begs the question, wasn't Bitcoin designed as a protocol to be currency, to be money, not a file storage system. And there's some that fall in the camp of Bitcoin's natural fees and gain theory will do what it can to the best extent that it can to limit spam by using fees. Some believe that this is contrary in attack to what Bitcoin's nature actually is. And so we need to introduce a protocol, a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, BIP 110, that would allow a user-activated software to signal to the network that we do not want these images, files, tokens, or anything else in the Bitcoin blockchain that is specifically supposed to be used for money. And there's an undercurrent going underneath of this entire conversation. Bitcoin Core developers used to be people that used to work on Bitcoin in their spare time, on the weekends at their house to contribute to Bitcoin. But now a lot of the Bitcoin Core developers are backed and their salaries are paid and provided for by large corporations that have incentives and interests that do not align with the Bitcoin node operators and runners who want to keep Bitcoin as money. But it begs the question, is Bitcoin just a protocol to transmit currency or potential currency, satoshis, or is it a internet protocol? Is it a network? Before we go any further, let's thank our sponsors, Ledn, the leader in Bitcoin-backed loans. If you don't want to give up your Bitcoin or sell your Bitcoin and have a capital gain or a capital loss, well, you can borrow against it with none of the effects. You post Bitcoin to the Ledn platform and they give you up to 50% of the fiat value of that in less than six hours. No capital gains at half the rate that you could have for a credit card, no credit checks, and you can pay it off and repay it anytime. They've issued over $10 billion worth of loans to tens of thousands of customers and never lost a single cent or satoshi of anyone's money. Work with Ledn. Don't sell your Bitcoin. There's a large camp of people that are looking at the Core V30 and say that there didn't need to be consensus or a broad agreement amongst the Bitcoin network for Core V30 to be dropped. And so, acting independently, there have been a group of people who have introduced another fork or a different software implementation of Bitcoin called Bitcoin NOTs. And these folks generally are the proponents of BIP 110, which is a one-year soft fork that caps the data field, protects the UTXO set to be primarily monetarily focused, and it expires after 12 months. It doesn't need Core's blessing. Any node that wants to enforce it can. BIP 110 needs 50% of miners to activate, not the 95% that you saw with SecWit or Taproot in the past. This mandatory signaling can kick in at block 961,632 with no voting required. So, on the side of proponents for BIP 110, my friend George Bodine does a great job of explaining BIP 110 in the perspective of the monetary maximalists and what it means to have nodes who can still control the network and not feel like the corporate miners and overlords are taking over.