Saylor and Back Push Back on BIP-110 Bitcoin Ordinals Proposal
Bitcoin bulls Michael Saylor and Adam Back have publicly criticized the BIP-110 proposal targeting Ordinals, even as on-chain activity has cooled.
Two of Bitcoin's most prominent advocates, MicroStrategy executive chairman Michael Saylor and cryptographer Adam Back, have come out in opposition to BIP-110, a technical proposal that would restrict or alter how Ordinals — digital artifacts inscribed directly onto the Bitcoin blockchain — function within the network. Their vocal resistance signals that even efficiency-minded debates over Bitcoin's base layer can quickly become ideological battlegrounds.
The BIP-110 proposal enters the conversation at an arguably awkward moment. Ordinals transaction activity has experienced a sustained decline over the past two years, raising questions about whether the proposal addresses a problem that the market has already partially resolved on its own. Critics of the initiative argue that intervening in protocol mechanics when organic usage is falling could set a precedent for future censorship of legitimate on-chain activity.
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Saylor and Back's opposition carries symbolic weight beyond their individual platforms. Both figures represent a strand of Bitcoin maximalism that views the blockchain's neutrality as sacrosanct — any filtering or restriction of transaction types, even those deemed frivolous, is seen as a threat to the network's core value proposition. For them, the debate is less about Ordinals specifically and more about who gets to define what belongs on Bitcoin.
The broader tension here reflects an unresolved question at Bitcoin's heart: is the blockchain a narrow payments rail optimized purely for value transfer, or a permissionless substrate open to any use case its users can inscribe? BIP-110 has forced that philosophical fault line back into public view, drawing in voices from across the ecosystem at a time when Ordinals themselves have receded from their peak cultural moment.
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