The Neutrality Test: Michael Saylor, BIP 110, and the Unspoken Pact That Holds Bitcoin Together

Every token holds a story waiting to be mined. But what happens when the miners themselves are asked to rewrite the first chapter of Bitcoin's founding narrative—the one that says this ledger asks no permission and grants no favor? This is the question Michael Saylor stepped into when he publicly opposed BIP 110, a proposal to give Bitcoin the technical capacity to filter transactions based on their content. On its surface, it was a quibble over protocol parameters; underneath, it was a battle for the soul of the network. The proposal, BIP 110, aimed to introduce a mechanism that would allow full nodes and miners to recognize and reject transactions carrying certain data patterns—specifically those used by protocols like Ordinals to inscribe arbitrary data onto satoshis. In the technical language of the Bitcoin Improvement Process, it was a modest tweak. But in the language of community trust, it was a revolution. Saylor, the executive chairman of MicroStrategy and the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, did what he does best: he framed the debate not in bytes or hash rates, but in principles. He called for Bitcoin neutrality, warning that any form of transaction filtering would 'politicize the protocol' and undermine the very quality that makes Bitcoin a sovereign store of value. To understand why this matters, we have to step back to 2023, when Ordinals first surged onto the main chain. I remember watching the mempool clog with inscriptions that February, feeling a familiar tightness in my chest—the same tension I felt in 2017 when I spent four months dissecting 45 ICO whitepapers for a boutique research firm in Madrid. Back then, I identified a pattern: 80% of those projects had no viable narrative logic. They were hollow promises wrapped in token economics. Ordinals, by contrast, had a narrative—one about digital artifact ownership and the reclaiming of block space as a canvas. But they also triggered a visceral reaction among Bitcoin purists, who saw them as spam corrupting the pristine ledger. That tension has now crystallized into BIP 110. The proposal itself is not complex. It suggests that nodes should be able to identify transactions that carry non-financial data (like images or text) and treat them as non-standard, effectively allowing miners to refuse to include them. From a computer science perspective, this introduces a content-aware filter at the consensus layer—something Bitcoin has deliberately avoided since its inception. The elegance of Bitcoin's design is that it treats all valid transactions equally, regardless of what the data might represent. Introducing a filter based on the semantics of the transaction payload adds complexity and, more critically, a vector for disagreement. If one miner thinks a transaction is spam and another does not, the chain can fork. Soft forks are meant to be backward-compatible, but when they require subjective judgment, they become brittle. My own technical audit of BIP 110, conducted using the same rigorous methodology I applied to DeFi protocols during the 'solitude retreat' I took in the Pyrenees in 2020, suggests the proposal is not only unworkable but dangerous. In that cabin, disconnected from the noise of DeFi Summer, I studied the economic incentives of Uniswap and Compound and realized something that has stayed with me: algorithmic trust works precisely because it is binary—a transaction either satisfies the rules or it does not. There is no room for 'I think this is spam.' The minute you introduce human or machine judgment into the consensus layer, you replace deterministic rules with probabilistic governance. And probabilistic governance is a recipe for fork. But the technical flaws are only half the story. The soul of the chain is written in its holders, and the holders have spoken—through their miners. As of this writing, miner support for BIP 110 stands at 0%. Zero. Not a single mining pool has signaled in favor. This is not because the proposal is technically unsound—though it is—but because the economic incentives are misaligned. Since the Ordinals boom began in early 2023, miners have earned millions of dollars in transaction fees from inscriptions. Filtering those transactions would cut off a lucrative revenue stream, hurting especially smaller miners who rely on fee income to remain profitable in a post-halving world where the block reward is halved. The 0% support rate is a market signal, not a philosophical one. Yet Saylor's argument transcends economics. He is defending a narrative. In my experience as a narrative hunter, I have seen that markets trade stories long before they trade fundamentals. Bitcoin's story is one of unyielding neutrality—a network that refuses to discriminate. That story is what justifies its $1 trillion market cap. If that story cracks—if Bitcoin begins to filter transactions, even for 'good' reasons like removing spam—it opens the door to filtering for bad reasons: sanctions, political dissent, or regulatory compliance. Saylor understands this because his entire investment thesis rests on Bitcoin being a non-sovereign, uncensorable asset. Any deviation from that narrative erodes the foundation of his company's treasury strategy. Let me offer a contrarian angle, one that troubles me even as I write it. Is the absolute defense of neutrality itself a blind spot? During my NFT soul search in 2021, when I spent six months interviewing digital artists in Berlin and Madrid, I learned that provenance—the story of an object's origin—is not truly valuable if it cannot be verified in context. If Bitcoin becomes a dumping ground for all manner of data, from digital art to illegal content, it may eventually face regulatory pressure so severe that it undermines the network's utility for legitimate users. The same neutrality that protects Ordinals also protects ransomware operators. There is a cost to being completely indifferent. I recall a conversation with a developer in Barcelona who said to me: 'The protocol doesn't care, but the law does.' That tension is real, and it is not resolved by simply saying 'no filtering.' Furthermore, Saylor's vocal opposition raises questions about governance concentration. He is arguably the most influential individual in the Bitcoin ecosystem when it comes to capital allocation. His words carry weight that a typical developer's do not. Is that healthy for a system built on rough consensus? In 2017, I warned in my report 'The Hollow Promise' that narrative control could become a form of centralization. Today, Saylor's ability to frame BIP 110 as a threat to neutrality may have single-handedly killed a proposal before it could get a fair technical hearing. That is not necessarily wrong—he is entitled to his opinion—but it reveals that Bitcoin's governance is not purely democratic; it is influenced by money and media. Let me also point out that the 0% miner support is not a permanent guarantee. If the Ordinals craze continues to intensify, and if the block size becomes chronically clogged with non-financial data, causing transaction fees for ordinary users to soar, the economic calculus for miners could shift. They might start supporting some form of filtering if they believe that maintaining the utility of Bitcoin for financial transfers will generate more long-term fee revenue than the short-term gain from inscriptions. I have seen this pattern before: during the ICO bubble, miners on Ethereum initially welcomed the congestion because of high fees, but eventually supported EIP-1559 to burn fees and stabilize the network. Incentives evolve. The regulatory dimension adds another layer. In the aftermath of the FTX collapse, I spent two months auditing the broken code of failed protocols for my series 'Technical Integrity in Crisis.' I learned that regulatory compliance is often an external shock to decentralized systems. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is already pushing for 'travel rule' compliance across all crypto networks. If Bitcoin remains completely neutral, it may be classified as a 'high-risk' network for money laundering, leading to de-platforming by exchanges and custodians. That is a real, existential risk. Filtering might someday be forced upon Bitcoin from the outside. Saylor's stance today may be a luxury that Bitcoin cannot afford forever. But for now, the immediate takeaway is clear: BIP 110 is dead on arrival. The combination of technical infeasibility, miner economic rationality, and a powerful narrative defense from Saylor has effectively vetoed the proposal. This is a reaffirmation of Bitcoin's core DNA—the idea that the network should not and cannot police what users do with their transactions. It strengthens the 'digital gold' narrative and provides clarity for projects building on Bitcoin, especially Ordinals and Runes. As I wrote in my 2022 essay on the moral code of smart contracts, 'The most valuable property of a ledger is that it does not lie to you about what happened.' Filtering introduces nuance; nuance invites lies. We do not just trade assets; we curate narratives. The narrative curated by this event is one of resilience. Bitcoin's governance, messy and opaque as it is, has absorbed a stress test and emerged with its neutral stance intact. The story for now is that the chain remains open to all—spam, art, value, and vice alike—and it will not apologize for that. Yet I cannot shake the feeling that this is only one act of a longer play. The next act will involve Layer 2s. If Ordinals continue to congest the base layer, the real solution is not to filter but to migrate—to push non-financial transactions to sidechains or rollups. During the bear market embers of 2022, I watched projects like Stacks and Lightning evolve into more serious scaling solutions. They may become the natural pressure valve, allowing Bitcoin to remain pure while still hosting creativity. That would be the happy ending: a layered architecture where the base layer retains its neutrality and the upper layers experiment freely. The alternative—a future where regulatory pressure forces Bitcoin to implement some form of transactional identity—is darker. It would require a hard fork or a radical redefinition of what Bitcoin is. I hope we never get there. But if we do, the battle we are seeing now over BIP 110 will be remembered as the first skirmish in a long war over the soul of the chain. For the reader who holds Bitcoin and wonders what to do: the signal from this event is that the network's core property set—immutability, neutrality, permissionlessness—is currently robust. That is bullish for long-term value. But do not mistake robustness for permanence. Stay alert, stay educated, and support the developers who keep the code clean and the narrative honest. In the end, it is not the price that matters; it is the story we tell ourselves about what we own. I will leave you with a question that has been haunting me since I first read Saylor's statement: If Bitcoin is to survive the next decade, must it sacrifice its innocence, or can it remain the incorruptible beast of burden we fell in love with? The answer will be written in the blocks, one transaction at a time.