Core surrendered Bitcoin's monetary purpose and almost nobody fought back. That's the BIP-110 story in one line.

First, Libre Relay. Peter Todd's relay was already passing and getting mined the "non-standard" transactions Core refused to relay. It proved the 83-byte OP_RETURN cap was never a rule. Just default relay policy, routed around in practice and increasingly pointless.

So v30 removed the cap. A RELAY POLICY change, not a consensus change. Consensus always permitted this data. Core simply aligned its defaults with what miners were already mining. Libre Relay had made the filter theater. Some read it as betrayal anyway. Matt Kratter called inscriptions ivy: looks harmless climbing the tree, then crushes the trunk and kills both.

September 2025: leaked Signal messages show Luke Dashjr floating a hardfork with a trusted multisig committee to retroactively scrub illegal content, swapping data for ZK proofs. His framing: "Bitcoin dies or we have to trust someone." Never a BIP, but it set the tone.

October 2025: "Dathon Ohm," GitHub account one day old, drops BIP-444. Luke assigns the number and backs it but denies writing it. The original mechanic is the wild one people still misremember as live: REACTIVE activation. A block carrying CSAM appears, the fork triggers immediately and retroactively reorgs that block and everything after it out. The author admits this splits the chain by design and says that's the point. It even claims a "moral and legal impediment" to rejecting the fork.

The room caught fire. BitMEX Research: an attacker just posts CSAM to force a reorg and double-spend. A reorg button for anyone. Alex Thorn: "an attack on Bitcoin." Lopp: who defines "illegal"? Run a node, you consent to the rules. Peter Todd embedded the ENTIRE proposal text on-chain, "100% standard," proving it was trivially bypassable.

So they sanded it down. December 3: BIP-444 dead, BIP-110 born. Reactive CSAM trigger: gone. Impediment clause: softened. Now a boring scheduled soft fork: BIP9/BIP8 hybrid, signal bit 4, 55% locks it in. Signaling opened December 1.

Then: nothing. Through early 2026 signaling sat at roughly zero, period after period. F2Pool signaled AGAINST. Ocean, Luke's own pool, peaked near 2% hashrate in January, fell back to ~1%. Knots node count crossed 22%, which proponents waved around endlessly, but node count isn't economic weight and isn't sybil-resistant.

The demos kept landing. l0rinc found a consensus bug in the BIP-110 code itself. March 1, Habovštiak embedded a 66KB image of Luke crying as a single contiguous transaction, killing the "can't be done contiguously" claim. Lopp kept offering real BTC bets to Luke, Mechanic and Kratter. No takers. The only market that appeared priced BIP-110 at ~98% to FAIL on a couple tenths of a BTC of volume.

Now: mandatory signaling runs blocks 961,632–963,647, starting around August 7. At that height Knots nodes reject any block not signaling bit 4. Lock in and it goes active two weeks later, expiring in ~1 year. Don't, and BIP-110 nodes fork onto a chain almost no hashrate mines, where you wait 50+ days to spend a coinbase. Chain split, or quiet death.

And that's the punchline. BIP-110 tries to weld at the consensus layer a thing that was never a consensus rule, to win a culture war Libre Relay already proved you can't filter your way out of. Signaling's at 0.3%, not one major pool on board. The math says quiet death with a tail risk of a doomed self-fork.

Watch block 961,632. Don't hold your breath.