Saylor: Changing Bitcoin code violates economic rights

Michael Saylor posted a nine-post thread on X on July 28, 2026, arguing that Bitcoin’s consensus rules function as a “constitution” and that changing them would seize economic power from current and future users. He identified BIP-110, covenants and proposals to increase block size as examples.

Saylor previously published a 110-point essay opposing BIP-110. In the thread he expanded his criticism beyond that single proposal, writing that protocol changes “must be rare, conservative, and driven by necessity, not ambition.” He added: “Bitcoin has won. Now it must survive victory. Bitcoin’s consensus rules are its constitution. To rewrite them for the convenience of any faction is to attack the economic rights of every participant today and every generation to come.”

BIP-110, formally called the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, would temporarily restrict certain non-financial data payloads on the Bitcoin blockchain, including Ordinals inscriptions, for about one year. Backers of the proposal say the change would protect the blockchain’s limited capacity and lower the long-term storage and bandwidth burden on full nodes. They note miners receive a one-time fee for including large data payloads, while every full node must continue to store and validate that data.

The proposal has been advanced by a relatively small constituency around the Bitcoin Knots client and some node operators. Its principal advocate uses the pseudonym Dathon Ohm, and longtime developer Luke Dashjr contributed to the original draft. Supporters describe the effort as an anti-spam measure intended to keep the network focused on peer-to-peer money rather than as a permanent storage layer for images, tokens and other arbitrary data.

Saylor framed those technical disagreements as a constitutional matter, arguing that any faction that invents a pretext to change consensus rules would impose costs and risks on others and effect what he called “economic theft.” He wrote: “Some proposals, like BIP-110, censor valid fee-paying transactions. Others add covenant machinery. Others demand larger blocks. Different instruments, same constitutional offense: a faction rewrites Bitcoin’s rules and imposes its agenda, costs, and risks on everyone.”

Developer Fred Krueger posted a response arguing the three directions are distinct: reducing permitted data, adding covenant functionality and increasing block capacity pursue different goals and should not be conflated. He said the proposals share only the fact that they would change protocol rules.

On timing, BIP-110’s mandatory signaling window is scheduled to begin around August 9 at block 961,632. A public signaling dashboard shows miner support at about 2.64%, below the 55% threshold commonly associated with activation. The thread and the proposal have intensified debate within the Bitcoin community about how the protocol should evolve and who should decide changes.