I was a BIP-110 supporter and I’m returning to the legacy chain.
I would have liked the miners to flip the bit to signal for BIP-110 but it’s not worth it at this point. Here’s why:
BIP-110 didn’t fail because bitcoin is captured. It failed because there wasn’t enough support for BIP-110.
Less than 20% of nodes were running it. Much less hashrate was supporting it.
I want to try to draw a parallel to the physical world:
If the people of the Midwest decide they want to tighten the rules for the entire USA, why would the USA make that change if they don’t feel the need to?
The people of the Midwest say “We’re going to enforce these rules across the country and we think you should too.”
The rest of the country says, “How are you going to enforce that?”
The Midwest says, “Well, we’re all going to enforce it in the Midwest and about 15% of us have guns.”
The country says, “How are you going to enforce that if you only make up 20% of the entire USA and only 15% of you have guns?”
The Midwest says, “Just watch, everyone else will enforce it, so you should too.”
My point is that if you want to make a change, you have to make some sacrifice. In the physical world people make sacrifices for change by putting themselves at risk both physically and financially. Not enough BIP-110 supporters really put any skin in the game.
They ran BIP-110 nodes but they didn’t have enough conviction to put enough money into buying hashrate and mining bitcoin to actually enforce it.
Back to my analogy, it would be like the Midwest saying, “We’re not going to spend any money on guns because we think the rest of the country who owns guns will enforce our rule, even though they said they won’t.”
It doesn’t mean miners are completely in control of bitcoin. Less than 20% of nodes were running BIP-110 and miners ignored it. It was the more conservative thing to do.
If 55% of nodes were running BIP-110, I don’t think miners would ignore it, even if hashrate was initially low.
The whole BIP-110 movement was really about resisting centralization. It wasn’t about spam. It was that high rates of spam and arbitrary data would make noderunning more difficult and lead to centralization.
At this point, now that BIP 110 is the minority chain, they're much more centralized than the legacy chain. the whole point of BIP 110 was to stop centralization and now BIP 110 is more centralized.