Michael Saylor: Bitcoin Code Is a Constitution, Changes Are Attacks on ‘Economic Rights’

Michael Saylor is no longer fighting BIP-110; he fights the idea that Bitcoin’s code can be changed. The executive chairman of Strategy posted a nine-message thread on X on Tuesday, reframing the entire protocol debate as a constitutional crisis.

“Bitcoin won. Now it must survive,” Saylor wrote on

Saylor has attacked a Bitcoin improvement proposal specifically called BIP-110. The ‘Reduced Data Temporary Softfork’ proposal that would restrict non-financial data such as Ordinals inscriptions from Bitcoin’s blockchain for about a year. Last week, Saylor posted a 110-point essay opposing it under the title “110 Reasons Why BIP 110 is a Bad Idea.”

Based on the current status of the proposal his position seems to have prevailed. Now Saylor has lumped BIP-110 together with covenants – smart contract-style restrictions that allow users to pre-program how their Bitcoin can be spent in the future – and proposals for larger blocks, which call for increasing the amount of data that can fit into each block to handle more transactions. His verdict on them all: different ideas, same crime.

“Some proposals, like BIP-110, censor valid transactions for a fee. Others add covenant mechanisms. Others require larger blocks,” he wrote. “Different tools, same constitutional violation: one faction is rewriting the rules of Bitcoin and imposing its agenda, costs and risks on everyone.”

The constitutional metaphor really does work here. Bitcoin’s consensus rules—the shared set of rules that all nodes and miners agree on to determine what counts as a valid transaction—are, in Saylor’s view, the functional equivalent of a country’s founding law. Rewrite them according to the ideological preferences of whichever faction, he argues, and you’re not just updating software. You are confiscating people’s economic rights.

“Bitcoin’s consensus rules are its constitution,” he wrote. “To rewrite them for the convenience of any faction is an attack on the economic rights of every participant today and every future generation.”

“Protocol changes should be rare, conservative, and driven by necessity, not ambition. Defend Bitcoin’s Constitution. Defend the future,” he wrote.

BIP-110’s main advocate is pseudonymous author Dathon Ohm, with longtime Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr a key participant in writing the original concept. The proposal is primarily supported by a relatively small ‘anti-spam’ group around Bitcoin Knots and node operators who believe Bitcoin should continue to focus on peer-to-peer money rather than becoming a persistent storage layer for things like Ordinals, tokens, images and other arbitrary data.

The argument is that miners collect a one-time fee for recording those payloads, while each full node operator must bear the long-term storage, bandwidth and validation costs. From their perspective, this is not censorship per se, but more a protection of a scarce public resource (i.e. the capacity of the blockchain).

BIP-110’s mandatory signaling window – the point at which nodes running the proposal’s software begin rejecting non-compliant blocks – opens around August 9, at block 961.632. The support for miners is according to the BIP-110 signaling dashboardwell below the 55% required for activation.