Blockstream’s Adam Back Calls BIP-110 Dead on Arrival at 0.86% Miner Support

Adam Back isn’t buying it. The Blockstream CEO came out swinging on July 18, 2026, dismissing claims that Satoshi Nakamoto would ever back BIP-110, a soft fork proposal that wants to cap data sizes in Bitcoin transactions and effectively target Ordinals-style inscriptions.

Back’s comments landed during a heated exchange on X, where a user floated the idea that Nakamoto — if alive today — would support the proposal. Back pushed back hard on two fronts. First, he questioned the assumption that Nakamoto is even dead, calling it speculation. Second, he flatly denied being Nakamoto himself, which, predictably, threw fresh fuel onto one of Bitcoin’s most tiresome recurring fires. Bitcoin was trading around $63,944 at the time, up roughly 1.43% over 24 hours — a detail that felt almost irrelevant next to the governance drama unfolding online.

The Funding Jab That Stung

Back didn’t stop at the Nakamoto angle. He went further, mocking BIP-110 supporters for their failure to fund what he called a “cypherpunk summer celebration.” It’s a sharp dig — the kind that lands because it’s probably at least partly true. The proposal’s backers haven’t managed to pull together the financial infrastructure you’d expect from a serious push to change Bitcoin’s base layer. No airdrops. No liquidity mechanisms. No fork futures. Back basically said: if you can’t even fund a party, how are you going to move miners?

And the miner numbers back him up. Only 0.86% of blocks have shown support for BIP-110. The activation threshold sits at 55%. That gap isn’t a hill to climb — it’s a canyon.

Mandatory Signaling Looms at Block 961,632

Here’s where it gets technically interesting. Mandatory signaling for BIP-110 kicks in around block 961,632. At the time Back made his comments, the network sat at block 958,529. That puts the signaling window roughly three weeks out — close enough that the community can’t ignore it much longer.

Back’s prediction for what happens next isn’t optimistic, at least not for BIP-110 supporters. He thinks the fork stalls immediately. The first mandatory signaling block, he warned, could trigger an automatic chain split. And without the miner backing to sustain a competing chain, that split would probably collapse fast. He called a potential failed fork a “Pompeii chain” — frozen in place, a monument to its own failure. That’s a vivid image, and it’s hard to argue with the underlying logic when you’re sitting at 0.86% support.

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The mechanics matter here. Soft forks need miner coordination to activate. Without it, mandatory signaling doesn’t create consensus — it creates conflict. Miners who don’t signal the new rules keep building on the original chain. Miners who do signal create a divergence. If the signaling minority is small enough, their chain gets orphaned. Back seems to think that’s exactly what happens here.

Governance Fault Lines, Again

BIP-110 isn’t just a technical argument. It’s a proxy war over what Bitcoin is supposed to be. The proposal targets Ordinals-style inscriptions — the mechanism that lets people embed arbitrary data, images, and text into Bitcoin transactions. Critics say it bloats the blockchain and clogs block space. Supporters of Ordinals say Bitcoin’s neutrality is the whole point, and filtering transactions by data type sets a dangerous precedent.

Back sits clearly in the skeptic camp. His broader argument, reading between the lines, is that BIP-110 lacks the legitimacy that comes from genuine community buy-in — financial, technical, and social. The Nakamoto angle is almost a sideshow. The real story is that a proposal with 0.86% miner support is trying to claim Bitcoin’s founding vision as justification. Back finds that argument weak.

It’s worth noting that Back has weighed in on fork risks before. His skepticism isn’t new, and it’s not personal — or at least, it’s not only personal. He’s been consistent about the bar required for changes to Bitcoin’s base layer. That bar, in his view, is high. BIP-110 hasn’t come close.

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The dormant coins debate keeps surfacing in these conversations too, tangled up with questions about Nakamoto’s identity and whether early Bitcoin philosophy should carry special weight in governance decisions. No resolution there. Probably none coming.

Back’s “Pompeii chain” line will get quoted a lot. Whether BIP-110 survives the mandatory signaling window at block 961,632 or collapses exactly as he predicted — that’s the only number that actually matters now.

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