People keep misunderstanding what BIP-110 is trying to do because they keep listening to liars and gaslighters. The biggest misconception is that BIP-110 is merely a technical proposal to stop inscriptions or limit OP_RETURN. It isn’t. At its core, BIP-110 is about preserving Bitcoin’s social contract. Every monetary system is built on shared expectations. Bitcoin is no different. It exists because millions of people coordinate around a simple idea: Bitcoin is money. That shared understanding determines how developers write software, how businesses build products, how governments regulate it, and ultimately why people assign it monetary value in the first place. Within Bitcoin there are many competing interests, all pulling in different directions. Some want censorship resistance. Some want digital collectibles. Some want permanent data storage. Some want financial settlement. These competing visions are ultimately reflected in two places: Bitcoin’s consensus rules and the default policy of its dominant implementation, Bitcoin Core. Until the end of 2025, both pointed in the same direction: Bitcoin is money. With the merge of Bitcoin Core v30, that changed. By expanding the default relay policy, Core officially acknowledged an additional legitimate use case: data storage. Consensus rules didn’t change, but Bitcoin’s default social signal did. That distinction is critical. People often respond, “Even if OP_RETURN is restricted, there are still many other ways to embed arbitrary data.” That’s true. But those methods remain hacks. A hack is an attack. It’s fundamentally different from an officially supported feature. Hacks exist despite the protocol, not because of it. They carry uncertainty. They can disappear at any time. They aren’t endorsed, documented, optimized, or defended by the ecosystem. That difference matters. If arbitrary data storage is treated as a legitimate Bitcoin use case, the network becomes an obvious target. Attackers no longer need a costly 51% attack or legislation banning Bitcoin itself. Instead, they attack everything surrounding Bitcoin. They target wallet developers. They target node operators. They target app stores. They target exchanges. They target infrastructure companies and miners. Most importantly, they attack Bitcoin’s monetary narrative. If Bitcoin becomes widely perceived as “a blockchain for storing arbitrary data,” governments will increasingly judge it by everything anyone chooses to publish forever. That dramatically expands Bitcoin’s regulatory attack surface while weakening its identity as neutral money. Money derives much of its value from social coordination. Weakening that coordination weakens Bitcoin’s monetary premium. This is why the social contract matters. BIP-110 doesn’t eliminate arbitrary data forever. Nothing realistically can. But it restores an important norm: storing arbitrary data on Bitcoin is an abuse of the network, not one of its intended purposes. Everything else BIP-110 achieves is secondary. Yes, it would severely disrupt today’s inscriptions economy. Existing businesses could adapt, but they would have to rebuild from scratch on far shaky foundations. Every future project would need to ask itself whether Bitcoin is really the right platform if its business model depends on behavior the network deliberately refuses to support. That uncertainty alone changes incentives. Many discussions around BIP-110 get lost in technical details. But Bitcoin has never been governed by code alone. Bitcoin is also governed by narratives. That’s why influential figures like Saylor, Fink and a whole entourage of government sewer dwellers spend enormous effort trying to redefine what Bitcoin is. Digital credit instead of money, digital asset instead of a cryptocurrency, digital gold instead of a payment system. The dominant narrative can either make or break this protocol’s future. If the dominant narrative shifts from “Bitcoin is money” to “Bitcoin is a general-purpose blockchain,” Bitcoin begins competing on entirely different terms - against platforms that were designed for exactly that purpose. That is a battle Bitcoin should never choose to fight. People often dismiss BIP-110 as irrelevant, unnecessary, or dead on arrival. Yet many of those same people invest extraordinary effort attacking it every single day. That contradiction should make you stop and think. If a proposal truly has no chance of succeeding, why devote so much time and energy trying to stop it? The effort betrays the intend. View quoted note →