‘They Don’t Know Bitcoin’: Adam Back Slams BIP-110 Supporters as Fork Deadline Nears

The activation of the controversial BIP-110 soft fork, designed to cleanse Bitcoin of NFT-like Ordinals inscriptions for one year, is entering the final stretch. Exactly three weeks remain until the deadline at block 961,632, when nodes supporting the project will begin forcibly rejecting blocks that do not signal support for the upgrade.

Activists attempted to frame support for BIP-110 as the ultimate test of being a “true Bitcoiner”.

However, in response to claims that the soft fork would separate real Bitcoiners from fake ones, Blockstream CEO Adam Back offered a rather blunt assessment of his opponents’ competence and stated directly: “They don’t know Bitcoin”.

The debate dividing Bitcoin leaders ahead of the split

According to Back, supporters of the initiative may have good intentions, but they simply do not understand how Bitcoin works and confuse real consensus with ultimatums issued on social media platforms such as X.

The situation surrounding BIP-110 has divided the Bitcoin community into two camps. One side believes spam transactions must be forcibly restricted to protect the network’s decentralization, while the other sees the proposal as a threat to permissionlessness.

Opponents of the fork, including Back and Strategy founder Michael Saylor, who recently published a manifesto against the upgrade, insist that transaction fees must be determined by the market.

According to the latter camp, Bitcoin must remain economically neutral, while any attempt to filter data represents subjective censorship that undermines the very nature of the system.

Despite the intense debate across media platforms, on-chain statistics show that miners and major capital holders have largely ignored the project. Actual signaling participation among mining pools remains stuck at 0.86%.

To lock in the upgrade under its reduced activation rules, the project must secure at least 55% of the network’s hash rate, which is now mathematically unrealistic.

No exchange-traded futures have emerged for the fork, and it has neither liquidity nor meaningful funding. Back even mocked the movement’s organizers for failing to monetize the campaign and raise money for a “cypherpunk afterparty”.

In three weeks, when the mandatory signaling code takes effect, nodes supporting the upgrade will begin rejecting standard blocks, potentially causing a Bitcoin chain split. However, because the new branch lacks sufficient computing power, Back predicts that it will immediately reach a dead end.