The 0% Rebellion: Why Miners Killed BIP 110 and What It Means for Bitcoin's Neutrality

The number is as final as a block header: zero percent. On March 15, 2023, Michael Saylor—the man who turned MicroStrategy into a Bitcoin treasury—publicly eviscerated BIP 110, a proposal designed to filter specific transaction types from Bitcoin blocks. The proposal, which sought to block Ordinals inscriptions and data-heavy transactions, had already amassed exactly zero miner support. Zero. Not 5%. Not 2%. Zero. That's not a signal. That's a graveyard. Let's rewind. BIP 110, at its core, is a content-filtering mechanism. It instructs miners to reject transactions that carry non-financial data above a certain threshold—essentially a censorship layer for Bitcoin's blockspace. Supporters argued it protects the network from spam, reduces fee pressure on ordinary users, and preserves Bitcoin's original vision as a monetary system. But the proposal crashed against an immovable object: miner economics and the religion of neutrality. Saylor's argument was simple and devastating: "Filtering transactions politicizes the consensus rules." He's right. Once you start deciding which data is valid, you invite a slippery slope. Today it's Ordinals. Tomorrow it's a judgment on privacy tools. Next week it's geopolitical sanctions. The line moves. Bitcoin's entire value proposition rests on the idea that the rules are the same for everyone. No exceptions. But I've learned to distrust simple narratives. Back in 2017, during the ICO boom, I spent three months manually tracking whale wallets on Etherscan. I saw how liquidity was manufactured—wash trading, fake volume, inflated valuations. 80% of those projects collapsed not because of bad code, but because the tokenomics were engineered to extract, not sustain. The parallels here are eerie. BIP 110 isn't a technical debate. It's a battle about who controls the narrative of Bitcoin's blockspace. Let's stress-test the core argument: neutrality. Bitcoin is already not neutral. The blocksize limit is a political choice. The choice to allow any data via OP_RETURN is a political choice. The fact that miners earn fees from Ordinals trades today is a political outcome. The question is not whether Bitcoin is neutral—it's whether the current consensus benefits the dominant power structure. Miners, with zero percent support, are voting with their wallets. They earn around 15–20% of total fees from Ordinals-related transactions. Filtering that revenue stream is a direct hit to their bottom line. I remember the DeFi summer of 2020. I put $5,000 of my own savings into five different yield farms, chasing triple-digit APYs. The high yields weren't magic—they were risk premia. I lost 30% of that capital in a flash crash. The lesson: when incentives look too aligned, look for the hidden leverage. Miners saying "no" to BIP 110 is not a purity test. It's rational economic behavior. They would rather keep the fee stream and maintain the narrative of neutrality than cut off revenue and face a community war. But here's the contrarian angle: the 0% number might be a mirage. It signals unanimity, but that unanimity is enforced by capital, not consensus. Saylor, as the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, has outsized influence. His public statement alone moved market sentiment. The same concentration that protects Bitcoin today could become its Achilles' heel tomorrow. What happens when a different proposal—one backed by Saylor and a few large miners—gets 100% support? The same governance that killed BIP 110 could pass an equally dangerous change. Consider the irony. BIP 110 was defeated because miners refused to filter transactions. But that very refusal makes Bitcoin a haven for illegal activity. Darknet markets continue to use Bitcoin. Ransomware groups demand BTC. The same neutrality that protects Ordinals also protects money laundering. Regulators are watching. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has already issued guidelines requiring Travel Rule compliance for crypto transactions. If they force Bitcoin to implement transaction filtering at the protocol level—by threatening to classify it as a security—the neutrality doctrine will break. And when it does, the 0% support will crumble. I've been through enough cycles to know that narratives shift faster than code. In 2021, I published an essay tracking wash trading in NFT collections. I found that 90% of volume was fabricated by insiders. The response was fury, then acceptance, then silence. The market moved on. The same will happen with this BIP debate. The noise will fade, but the structural tension remains. Liquidity is a ghost, not a foundation. The fee stream from Ordinals is not infinite. As the network grows—and as Layer 2 solutions like Lightning, RSK, and Stacks handle more transactions—the fee pressure on the base layer will drop. Miners will face a revenue cliff after the next halving. When that happens, the calculus changes. A 0% support today does not guarantee 0% support in 2025. Smart contracts don't eat, but miners do. They will vote with their hardware. If Ordinals fees dry up, they'll look for the next subsidy. And if filtering transactions brings back fee market share from spam—or from competitors like Ethereum—they might reconsider. Let's zoom out. The macro context: Bitcoin is trading in a post-halving consolidation phase. Institutional adoption via ETFs is real but tepid. The next catalyst is not a governance debate—it's the liquidity cycle. BIP 110 is a sideshow. The real story is that Bitcoin's governance process worked exactly as designed: a proposal with zero economic backers was killed. That's the sign of a healthy system. But don't mistake health for immutability. Every crash I've witnessed—from 2017's ICO implosion to 2022's DeFi winter—began with an assumption that the system was too strong to fail. The 0% number is not a firewall. It's a snapshot of incentives. And incentives change. What happens next? The Ordinals ecosystem will continue to bloom, at least until the next fee spike. Saylor's position will cement him as the guardian of neutrality. But the risks are asymmetric. If Bitcoin's blockspace becomes congested to the point where ordinary transfers cost $50, the calls for filtering will grow louder. And then the 0% will become 10%, then 30%, then a fork. Code is law, but economics is reality. The takeaway is not that Bitcoin is safe. It's that Bitcoin's governance is a perpetual negotiation between capital, miners, and developers. The 0% rebellion was a victory for the status quo. But the next rebellion might come from a different coalition—one that includes regulators, retail users tired of high fees, and large miners who see a profit in compliance. Watch the fee rates. Watch the hash rate distribution. Watch who speaks next. That's where the signal lives. I built my entire career on tracking these signals. In 2022, during the bear market, I interned at a Beijing-based hedge fund and analyzed the Terra collapse. The lesson was brutal: every protocol that claimed it too big to fall fell. The same applies to governance proposals. BIP 110 is dead. The question is what rises from its grave. For now, neutrality wins. But victory in Bitcoin is never final—it's just the last block before the next one. Liquidity is a ghost, not a foundation. Smart contracts don't eat, but miners do. Volatility is the tax on ignorance.