Adam Back Warns Bitcoin Community of ‘Literal Downgrade’: Why BIP-110 Being Labeled Trojan Horse for BTC

A conflict has erupted within the Bitcoin community around BIP-110, which by March 2026 has become one of the most discussed topics related to the leading cryptocurrency.

For those not familiar, BIP-110 is a Bitcoin improvement proposal, put forward by a developer under the pseudonym Dathon Ohm in December 2025 with the goal to limit the volume of arbitrary data, images and video that are being written into the blockchain through protocols such as Ordinals and Runes.

The method, though, is the introduction of a temporary 12-month soft fork to filter spam at the consensus level.

Why Bitcoin veterans oppose BIP-110

This is where the key complication emerges. Blockstream CEO Adam Back, a figure whom Satoshi Nakamoto himself mentioned in the Bitcoin white paper, along with other industry veterans such as Jameson Lopp and Wang Chun, have come out categorically against BIP-110.

First and foremost, they cite the threat to neutrality. Back believes that attempts to censor transaction types at the consensus level are more harmful to the network than the spam itself, which he has been actively fighting.

Second is the risk of confiscation. The proposal could make some existing UTXOs unusable, which effectively amounts to freezing user funds. Finally, there is the risk of a network split. Activating a soft fork without broad agreement, with a proposed threshold of 55% instead of the traditional 95%, could lead to the blockchain splitting into multiple branches.

Adding fuel to debate, another well-known Bitcoiner under the nickname Hodlnaut accused Adam Back of arrogance and of ignoring the problem of protocol governance.

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BIP-110 will most likely go down in history as a great filter. If the network rejects it, Bitcoin will reaffirm its resistance to censorship. If it accepts it, BTC will take its first step toward more centralized governance, where rules can change according to the prevailing agenda.