Why I Am Running BIP-110 A Node Operator's Thesis March 2026 Introduction Bitcoin has survived seventeen years of skeptics, forks, hacks, regulatory attacks, and market cycles. It has done so because its architecture was built around one foundational principle: decentralization. Not as an aesthetic choice, but as the mechanism that makes everything else possible, including censorship resistance, immutability, and trustlessness. BIP-110 is my commitment to defending that architecture before a slow, compounding threat normalizes itself into permanence. 1. Bitcoin Is Money, Not a Database Bitcoin's value as a monetary network derives from properties no other asset has replicated: a fixed supply, censorship resistance, and a decentralized verification layer that no single entity controls. These properties are not incidental, they are the product of careful design and seventeen years of network growth. Inscriptions and Ordinals are not an extension of that design. They are a hack. The witness discount introduced by SegWit was designed to incentivize moving signature data off-chain and reduce UTXO bloat. It was exploited to stuff arbitrary, non-financial data into the witness field at a subsidized rate, data that has nothing to do with transaction validation and that every node on the network must store permanently. The argument that Bitcoin needs to compete with Ethereum or support arbitrary smart contracts misunderstands what makes Bitcoin uniquely valuable. Bitcoin does not need to be everything. It needs to be the best at one thing: sound, decentralized, permissionless money. 2. Your Node Is Not a Free Database This is the core of the argument and it is not complicated. Every full node operator in the world stores a complete copy of the blockchain. That storage is permanent and cumulative. When arbitrary data is embedded on-chain, the cost of storing it is not borne by the person who paid the transaction fee, it is distributed across every node operator, forever, without their consent and without compensation. The people inserting inscription data pay once. The people running nodes pay indefinitely. That is not a fee market. That is an externality imposed on the infrastructure that makes Bitcoin work. The long-term trajectory is arithmetic, not speculation. If inscriptions scale, and there is no protocol-level reason they cannot, the cumulative chain size will grow until running a full node transitions from something a person can do on modest hardware to something that requires dedicated infrastructure. Once that threshold is crossed, it does not reverse. The people priced out of node operation do not come back, and the network they exit becomes measurably more centralized with each one who leaves. 3. The Free Market Will Not Save Us in Time The standard response to node cost concerns is that the fee market will eventually price out spam. This argument fails on both practical and philosophical grounds. Practically, a solo node operator cannot wait for the market to find equilibrium. Storage costs, bandwidth bills, and hardware requirements are real expenses hitting real people today. Telling them to absorb the cost while the theory proves itself is not a policy, it is an abdication. As Keynes observed in a different context: markets can be wrong longer than a node operator can remain solvent. The asymmetry is further compounded by irreversibility. Even if the fee market eventually corrects, every byte stored during the correction period is stored permanently. A market equilibrium arriving five years from now does not delete five years of inscription data from every node's storage. The free market argument asks node operators to personally subsidize the experiment while waiting for the outcome. 4. Bitcoin Core Opened the Door Wider The urgency of BIP-110 cannot be understood without acknowledging what Bitcoin Core's most recent release did. Core v30 raised the OP_RETURN data limit from 80 bytes to 100,000 bytes, a 1,200x increase in the volume of arbitrary data that can be embedded in transactions by default. The 80 byte limit was not arbitrary. It was deliberate friction, designed to make arbitrary data storage expensive and limited. Its removal was not a neutral technical decision. It was a policy choice that directly expanded the vectors BIP-110 is trying to close, made without meaningful community consensus, and in direct opposition to the concerns of a significant portion of node operators. The response from Core developers to community dissent, including reports of nodes running scripts to ban connections to Bitcoin Knots nodes, further demonstrates that the governance process cannot be relied upon to address this problem through normal channels. BIP-110 exists because the conventional path was closed. 5. Closing Known Vectors Is Not Perfectionism Critics of BIP-110 point to demonstrated workarounds, citing developers who have shown that data can still be embedded through alternative methods even if BIP-110 activates. This is offered as a reason not to act. This argument does not hold. No security measure eliminates every attack vector simultaneously. The standard for intervention has never been perfection, it has been whether the measure meaningfully reduces the attack surface and raises the cost of abuse. BIP-110 closes the cheapest, widest, and most commercially exploited pathways. Determined bad actors will work harder. Industrial-scale inscription protocols will not. The same logic applies to the most serious abuse case: arbitrary data embedding has historically been used to store illegal material including CSAM, not at scale on BTC, but the vector exists and has been exploited. Core v30's 1,200x expansion of the OP_RETURN limit dramatically widens that attack surface going forward. The legal exposure for node operators remains debated, as most legal analysis suggests automated relaying does not satisfy the knowing possession standard required for criminal liability, but node operators never consented to absorbing that risk at any level, and expanding the vector without community consensus makes that imposition worse. Leaving a known abuse pathway wide open because the legal exposure is merely contested rather than proven is not a principled position. It is inaction dressed as caution. 6. Miner Incentives Are Structurally Compromised Post-halving, as block rewards shrink, miners are becoming increasingly dependent on fee revenue from inscription and Ordinals activity to remain solvent. Their financial interests are structurally diverging from those of node operators and long-term holders in a way that was not true in Bitcoin's early years. This is not a criticism of individual miners. It is a description of an incentive structure that produces predictable behavior. Asking a miner operating at the edge of profitability to signal for BIP-110 and potentially reduce their fee revenue is not a governance question for them, it is an existential one. The low 55% activation threshold in BIP-110 is a direct acknowledgment that the conventional 95% threshold effectively gives financially captured miners a permanent veto over network hygiene. Bitcoin has a seventeen-year track record of confounding predictions that miner incentives would break the network. The combination of price appreciation, hardware efficiency gains, and energy cost optimization has absorbed every halving cycle. That history argues for confidence in Bitcoin's long-term resilience, but it does not argue for allowing a dependency on inscription revenue to deepen indefinitely while the structural problem compounds. 7. The Momentum Is Real Node signaling for BIP-110 has grown from under 3% in January 2026 to approximately 8.9% as of mid-March, nearly tripling in under two months. With Bitcoin Knots nodes representing approximately 22% of the total network and BIP-110 having captured roughly 40% of that population already, the trajectory toward 20%+ node signaling before September is plausible. This matters because the 2017 SegWit activation demonstrated that sustained UASF node pressure can shift miner behavior even when financial incentives initially point the other way. Miners ultimately need economically significant nodes to accept their blocks and cash out coinbase rewards. A node signaling movement that reaches critical mass creates real economic pressure regardless of what any individual miner prefers. Conclusion Running BIP-110 is not a statement that Bitcoin's governance process is broken beyond repair, or that the 55% activation threshold sets a precedent I am entirely comfortable with, or that every technical objection to the proposal is without merit. It is a statement that the node cost problem is real, compounding, and partially irreversible. That the free market and conventional governance channels have demonstrated they will not address it in time. That closing known spam vectors, even imperfectly, is better than leaving them open while debating the perfect solution. And that the decentralization Bitcoin was built to protect is worth defending with imperfect tools rather than surrendering with perfect arguments. Seventeen years of network growth have been built on the backs of ordinary people willing to run nodes. That is worth protecting. — Satoshi Nakamoto, March 2026