The fight over Bitcoin’s future is being waged with distorted history and padded metrics.
On What Bitcoin Did, analyst Mr Hodl argues that comparing the push for BIP110 to the 2017 SegWit activation is a bluff. SegWit had 95% consensus and genuine miner opposition; BIP110, he says, lacks support from exchanges, major miners, or the economic majority. Advocates are trying to bluff the change into existence by mimicking the aesthetics of 2017 without the underlying substance.
"If the rules don't fit, the solution is simple: fork the chain. Trying to force a change on the existing network without overwhelming consensus isn't an upgrade."
- Mr Hodl, What Bitcoin Did
Wicked Smart Bitcoin analyst Wicked points to massive, overnight spikes in BIP110 node counts as evidence of a coordinated Sybil attack. These are likely virtual instances spun up cheaply on cloud services to create the illusion of broad consensus. The data shows these nodes provide no economic value and are designed to pressure miners with a hollow signal.
For Mr Hodl, the core danger is the proposed 55% activation threshold. He warns it turns a soft fork into a network co-option, a radical departure from the 90-95% standards of upgrades like Taproot. A narrow majority, potentially driven by legal pressure on a few large U.S.-based mining pools, could hijack the protocol. If a fork occurred at such low hash power, the minority chain would stall, becoming unusable.
This internal governance clash arrives as external pressure mounts. Ungovernable Misfits detailed the Mining in America Act of 2026, which creates a two-tier system favoring state-certified miners. The bill would grant certified miners tax breaks and capital gains exemptions unavailable to home miners, centralizing hash power under federal influence.
The BIP110 battle is a stress test. It asks whether Bitcoin’s change mechanism can withstand manufactured consensus and if its decentralization can survive both internal governance attacks and external legal capture.
