Only about 2.5% of miners are signaling for BIP-110. It needs 55%.
Everything that matters about this story lives in that gap. The mandatory signaling period for BIP-110 opened around 19:35 UTC Saturday, when Bitcoin mined block 961,632. The proposal would place a temporary limit on non-financial data stored on the network. Judging by the earliest blocks, whoever controls the hash power has no appetite for it.
That indifference has company at the top. Strategy chairman Michael Saylor and Blockstream CEO Adam Back have each publicly opposed the proposal — roughly the closest thing Bitcoin has to an establishment consensus.
Miners get a say, right up until they don’t
This is the point where BIP-110 departs from ordinary soft fork behavior. Its advocates are framing it as a user-activated soft fork — a UASF — moving the decision away from miners and into the hands of node operators.
There is nothing subtle about how it works. Node software is updated so that any block from a miner not signaling support for BIP-110 gets rejected outright. Miners comply or they are cut off.
The precedent supporters cite is 2017. SegWit, which split digital signatures away from transaction data, activated via BIP-148 on exactly this reasoning, going through even though the required miner support never materialized. Users made it happen.
The precedent is genuine. It is also a single data point.
What running the software actually means you’re rejecting
Set the governance debate aside and what adopting BIP-110 does right away is straightforward: your node refuses the network that virtually the whole mining sector is constructing.
That raises the prospect of two competing Bitcoin networks running at once. One would be the dominant mainnet, carrying the overwhelming majority of hash power along with institutional capital. The other would be a minority chain made up solely of nodes enforcing BIP-110.
From there, two things can happen. Either the breakaway chain attracts node operators, builds prominence and pressures miners into moving — or it stalls out for want of support.
Four weeks on the clock
Signaling stays open until block 965,664, roughly four weeks away.
That is 4,032 blocks from the starting point, and there isn’t much ambiguity in the figures as they stand. Climbing from 2.5% to 55% within that window would mean most of the mining industry reversing course inside a month, and nothing in the public remarks from Bitcoin’s loudest voices points that way.
Which makes the real question something other than whether miner signaling carries BIP-110 over its threshold. The question is how many node operators choose to run the UASF software regardless, and whether that figure gets big enough to unsettle anyone in mining.
Elsewhere in privacy coins
Zcash is pursuing its Tachyon upgrade to scale shielded payments, strengthen quantum readiness, and put its funding, security, and governance to the test.
Node operators feeling the pull should know exactly what they are committing to before block 965,664 lands. Turning away 97.5% of the network’s hash power is not a protest vote you can withdraw when the next block arrives.