10 August 2026
BIP 110 is dead. Or at least this version of it is. The fork happened, two blocks were mined on it, and then the thing more or less ground to a halt under Bitcoin’s bone-crushing mining difficulty. The main chain just kept going. Transactions cleared, miners mined, liquidity flowed, and Bitcoin did what Bitcoin always does when people try to settle an argument by force: it made everyone look like an idiot. That is probably the most important part of this entire mess. Nobody needed a regulator, a committee, or permission to look like an idiot. The fork happened, the market looked at both chains, and the answer came back very quickly: YOU ARE ALL IDIOTS!
I have said repeatedly that I do not like spam on Bitcoin. I do not like ordinals and inscriptions. I run a node, and blockchain bloat is not something I'm overly fond of. If people stopped stuffing enormous amounts of non-financial data into transactions tomorrow, I would be perfectly happy. But that does not mean I am going to shove consensus rules into a paper bag, soak it in diesel, light it on fire, and throw it out of a window every time somebody uses Bitcoin in a way I find irritating. If a transaction is valid under the existing consensus rules, then it is valid. I may hate it. I may hate it but that won't change what the rules say.
That is why my mind keeps coming back to the Constitution during these kinds of debates. You do not get to treat foundational rules like a menu. Maybe one rule seems outdated. Maybe another one seems stupid. Maybe one gets abused. Fine. The danger begins when everybody decides the rules are only binding until they become inconvenient. Once that becomes normal, you no longer have a stable system. You have political factions. You have whoever screaming the loudest trying to rewrite the contract. Bitcoin is useful precisely because it is extraordinarily difficult to do that. Almost impossible, in fact.
"Fork your mother if you want to fork!" - Jihan Wu
The Ocean Mining part of this story bothers me much more than the existence of the BIP 110 fork itself. Run whatever software you want. Point your own hash wherever you want. That's Bitcoin. But miners apparently believed they were mining one chain while some of their hash rate was being directed toward another, and Ocean later said it would reimburse affected miners. That is not a philosophical debate about spam anymore. That is a very serious trust problem. Some ordinary miners spent real money trying to support what they believed was the “real” Bitcoin according to the people promoting BIP 110, only to watch the chain mine two blocks and stall. There's a good argument available here about spam and blockchain use and it was used to dupe people into spending real money on real hardware and time to pull their rig together only to be abandonded.
Same in Washington D.C., just with better suits and worse coffee. The CLARITY Act has been pushed into September because the votes are not there yet, and one of the recurring problems is Donald Trump’s own involvement in crypto businesses. Then, almost on cue, Trump Media scraps its planned CRO treasury vehicle and backs away from directly integrating prediction markets into Truth Social. The official explanation is market conditions and shifting priorities. Maybe. I think there is a much simpler political explanation: somebody needs votes for CLARITY, and Trump’s crypto interests were making those votes harder to get. Walking away from potentially enormous crypto and prediction-market deals looks a lot like somebody removing an obstacle.
To top it off, Michael Saylor decided to insult the injuries of the week. Strategy sold 1,690 Bitcoin, sold more MSTR shares to the mid-wits, added to its dollar reserve, and immediately the market got another round of “Saylor sold Bitcoin” headlines. What you heard much less about was another treasury company buying more Bitcoin than Strategy sold. It's "narrative pie". Strategy has become such a large character in the Bitcoin market that its actions become the story, whether or not they represent the whole picture. I am also increasingly tired of the Bitcoin treasury-company trade in general. The novelty has worn off. Everybody is standing around in the shallow end waiting for adult swim while the market tries to figure out which of these companies actually built something durable and which ones simply found a new wrapper for financial engineering.
In times like these (and often, not in times like these) I focus on the What is wealth? question. A listener brought up family, rural life, and stepping away from the rat race. Is wealth a number inside Vanguard? Is it a bank balance? Is it a rental property sitting inside an LLC? Maybe. But those dollars buy less every year, accounts can become inaccessible, digital systems can fail, wallets can be compromised, and companies can disappear. At some point, wealth starts looking more like actual utility. Family living close enough that you can help them in fifteen minutes instead of buying a plane ticket. A place to live. Food. Skills. Bitcoin you control. Time you control. Relationships that do not depend on a server staying online. The BIP 110 fight was supposedly about what belongs on Bitcoin, but the larger lesson may be simpler: systems matter because rules matter, and wealth matters because control matters. Everything else is just somebody else’s database.
BIP 110 Bitcoin fork
Bitcoin consensus rules
Ocean Mining BIP 110
CLARITY Act crypto
Michael Saylor Bitcoin sale
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