Vortex Debunked (Again)
“BIP110 doesn’t even fix the issue it claims to fix” (yes, he seriously said that)
Dear reader, let’s make one thing clear from the get-go.
Vortex claims above “[BIP]110 does not stop or slow down any spam”. This is such a disgusting and blatant lie that the data spam apologist camp keeps repeating over and over again. Not only is it annoying, it actually completely discredits their whole narrative against BIP110, as it puts everything they claim in a negative spotlight. Simply because they are obviously not afraid to lie about the basic facts of BIP110.
BIP110 works as a charm and that is proven on at least 2 places.
Source 1: Bitcoin Block Space Weekly
Source 2: Secure Sovereign
“I’m not specifically a Knots advocate (though I support alternatives generally) and I’ve been skeptical of BIP-110’s activation path. But I did run the data. Across 912,723 blocks and 1.2 billion transactions, BIP-110 is well-targeted, with 81.1% of blocked transactions classifying as spam. In the post-inscription era, transactions BIP-110 would block account for 4.93% of all block weight, versus 0.29% before inscriptions began, a 17x intensification in spam.”
“Adam [Back] blocked me for my research awhile ago, the others have been ignoring me.”
And this poor lad called Vortex apparently still hasn’t come across my previous article “Stop Being Retarded, Bitcoiners, Eat A Bag Of Dicks”. After blocking many BIP110 proponents including the undersigned, his echo chamber has apparently become so small that a lot of things happening in the outside world doesn’t reach him any more.
Not that it bothers me, on the contrary; the anti-data spam movement is growing steadily, despite Vortex et al their efforts to mock this movement, its community and its members, and its output like Knots and BIP110.
Then I also came across a more recent tweet of Vortex, where he mentions several other elements of BIP110 that he thinks are critical.
I immediately noticed the misinformation that Vortex is trying to spread again here. For those who still come across his tweets, this quick write up is for you.
Intro
MyLegacyKit is still the pseudonym of writer and Bitcoin researcher Arthur van Pelt, previously known for his around 50 mostly long form articles mapping out the Craig “I am not Satoshi Nakamoto” Wright identity fraud. Wright’s claim to be Satoshi turned out to be a lie “founded on an elaborate false narrative and backed by forgery of documents on an industrial scale” as narrated by COPA’s lead barrister, Jonathan Hough KC, during the opening arguments of the COPA v Wright trial on February 5, 2024. This exact narrative was practically fully adopted by Justice Mellor in his May 2024 judgment, who wrote:
The evidence is fabricated and/or based on documents I am satisfied have been forged on a grand scale by Dr Wright. I am entirely satisfied that Dr Wright lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly. All his lies and forged documents were in support of his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
In hindsight, it is completely fair to say that my full body of work has been summarized in Justice Mellor his judgment.
This is my third article about Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 (BIP110), a technical upgrade to Bitcoin that I consider necessary for Bitcoin to survive in the long run and ultimately become reserve currency.
What is BIP110 again?
BIP110 (Reduced Data Temporary Softfork / RDTS) is a temporary one-year consensus soft fork designed to limit certain methods of embedding large arbitrary data into Bitcoin transactions at the consensus level. Its goal is to push back against the growing normalisation of Bitcoin as a general data storage layer (e.g., Ordinals and other inscriptions, Runes, Stamps, large OP_RETURNs, and other related arbitrary data spam), which burdens node operators, distorts Bitcoin’s incentives, raises fees for native monetary use cases, and diverts Bitcoin community focus from Bitcoin as sound money.
The BIP110 fans know that 95% of the Bitcoin community hates spam (but there is not always consensus about how to fight it, while there is even a little but surprisingly still influential group who think that sitting still and doing nothing is the best remedy), they also know that Bitcoin was once — before 2023 — way more spam resilient, and they know that we have the technical means to return to that era (which Bitcoin Knots is proving on a daily basis).
What the BIP110 fans are also fully aware of: data spam comes in many shapes and forms, and several of these forms are serious attack vectors that should not be underestimated. For example privileged, copyrighted, illegal, and classified data all add unnecessary legal, technical and reputational risks to Bitcoin the moment it is pumped in the Bitcoin blockchain by a bad actor. Therefore, sitting still and doing nothing is not an option. The awareness of this viewpoint is falling on lesser and lesser deaf ears, is my firm impression.
The Tweet
The aforementioned tweet from Vortex lists a total of eight largely unsubstantiated claims and criticisms. I’ll address them point by point with context from the BIP he is trying to criticise, and with context from the broader design and development principles. Let’s break down his tweet first:
“Well currently
- it has little to no peer review, is being rushed out the door,
- centralizes the blockspace market,
- blocks upgrade paths for LN like ln-symmetry,
- breaks miniscript,
- destroys bitcoin’s promise of neutrality and censorship resistance,
- only has a 55% threshold which all but guarantees a split and
- can only be considered an attack when compared with past SFs [Soft Forks, Vortex means] that all had a 90%+ threshold,
- oh and by the way doesn’t even fix the issue it claims to fix.
This can all be properly addressed (again). Here we go.
1. "Little to no peer review, is being rushed out the door"
Let’s put this claim in the proper context first. Because reality is, BIP110 was proposed October 26, 2025 by Dathon Ohm. It was formally assigned BIP number 110 on December 3, 2025. It was added to Bitcoin Knots end of January 2026. BIP110 has had and still has extensive public discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing lists, on the GitHub BIP entry, including extensive test vectors, code walk-throughs, and several publications on signaling dashboards. Discussions about the proposal have been wide and extensive, from Reddit to BitcoinTalk to Twitter.
Several proponents (including people like Luke Dashjr) have produced explanatory content addressing questions and objections. Extensive testing including publication of the test results has been conducted by, among more, Renaud Cuny and Dathon Ohm himself. Both these individuals have always appreciated mature comments and mature critics on their test and other work, they have answered numerous questions in good faith, they always stayed friendly and open to critics, and they have finetuned tests and their results, and adjusted even the BIP itself, when issues arose that warranted this line of action.
What Vortex conveniently forgets in his desperate urge to be critical in front of his echo chamber, Bitcoin’s permissionless development process has always been decentralised and is therefore somewhat messy, with turmoil of all kinds coming from expected and unexpected corners. BIPs are proposals, not mandates. Soft forks like BIP110 historically always involved lots of debating, excitement and disappointment around signaling, adjustments to project documentation when needed, and sometimes slow, sometimes fast full node and miner adoption (look at SegWit, for example). Vortex his claim of BIP110 being "rushed out the door" is therefore highly subjective and can even be called completely untrue looking at the attention that the BIP had in a timespan of no less than 9 months.
Let’s also not forget that BIP110 is a defence reaction in response to several years of hostile data spamming starting in 2023, followed by Bitcoin Core’s highly controversial data spam-friendly direction with their October 2025 v30 release. Instead of closing the data spam floodgates, they surprisingly opened them further in the perception of many bitcoiners. BIP110 is a summary of ideas and technical solutions that have been breeding in the Bitcoin community for several years already.
To add, the as we speak still low initial miner signaling (~1% in recent days, against ~15% full nodes signaling) shows that BIP110 is not steamrolling the Bitcoin network, and it also shows that all Bitcoin stakeholders take their sweet times — 9 months now, nothing extraordinary here — making a decision about activation of BIP110, or not.
2. "Centralizes the blockspace market"
This is, of course, backwards. This is not the first time that Vortex does not have a proper line of events, or a clear view on cause and effect, in mind. Because, BIP110 does not further centralise the blockspace market in any sense. Obviously, it’s the other way round.
Large data storage (e.g., Ordinals and other inscriptions, NFTs, "dick pics", several token protocols) creates artificial blockspace demand by non-supported use cases that have found a hostile workaround to get it their way, and abuse Bitcoin as immutable data spam storage for, oh irony, often short lived data spam trends.
‘Their way’ meanwhile competes with monetary transactions, driving up fees and favouring those who can afford or optimise data spam from so-called whales, from dedicated data spam protocols, or otherwise low-to-no-value bulk data. This centralises the effective use of Bitcoin toward high-margin non-monetary apps and as a consequence this burdens the decentralised node runners who had never asked let alone approved for hosting and spreading this data spam.
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In my previous article this claim was already addressed as follows, where Vortex talked about this argument under the umbrella of miner centralisation:
“Private relay for non-standard often high fee transactions already exists since long. Large pools like Foundry, Antpool, ViaBTC, etc. have historically accepted direct transaction submissions via email, via private APIs, or other custom channels, especially for non-standard often high fee transactions. Some pools also run looser mempool policies or private relay setups so they can include transactions that default Bitcoin Core nodes reject. Marathon Digital’s Slipstream API is one of the most prominent current examples. Slipstream is a direct transaction submission portal run by one of the largest Bitcoin miners, Marathon.
So basically, this is a non-argument of theonevortex.
BIP110 makes large contiguous junk uneconomical publicly, pushing spammers to alternatives (other chains, sidechains, or fragmented transactions). This reduces overall bloat, it benefits home/small miners via a healthier public fee market dominated by monetary transactions, and it does not necessarily create additional private transaction mining markets.”
BIP110 restores the balance that existed up till early 2023 by enforcing tighter limits on new UTXOs/outputs (scriptPubKeys ≤34 bytes except OP_RETURN ≤83 bytes; data pushes/witness items ≤256 bytes) while grandfathering pre-activation UTXOs. This makes monetary transactions like native onchain Bitcoin payments, Lightning channels and standard multisig transactions cheaper and more predictable relative to spam. Fee markets will still allocate blockspace; but this just removes a major distortion.
To cut a long story short, the fee market ultimately works best when blockspace is primarily — and only — used for monetary settlements, and not for subsidised data storage.
And make no mistake, there is also substantive historical precedent, as Bitcoin has long resisted non-monetary bloat (as strongly advised by Satoshi Nakamoto, leading to early data embedding discussions that can still be found on BitcoinTalk’s Bitcoin Forum).
The following section with Satoshi Nakamoto quotes has been lifted from my first BIP110 article “BIP110 For The Win”.
How do we actually know what Satoshi Nakamoto thought of arbitrary data? Does arbitrary data fall within his vision of Bitcoin being an Electronic Cash System, which we now call sound money? Let’s have a look at his public scribblings. Here are three clear quotes from Satoshi Nakamoto expressing opposition to excessive or arbitrary non-financial data bloating the Bitcoin blockchain.
1. On piling multiple systems/data into one chain (BitDNS discussion, December 10, 2010):
Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn’t scale. Bitcoin and BitDNS can be used separately. Users shouldn’t have to download all of both to use one or the other.
This directly addresses the idea of using the Bitcoin chain as a general data or multi-application storage layer.
2. Continuing in the same post, on differing needs for data/features:
BitDNS users might be completely liberal about adding any large data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, while Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it’s easy for lots of users and small devices.
Satoshi obviously anticipated (and aligned with) strong user preference for keeping the chain lean and accessible, rather than loading it with large arbitrary data.
3. On recording messages/data in the blockchain (Oct 23, 2010):
ECDSA can’t encrypt messages, only sign signatures. It would be unwise to have permanently recorded plaintext messages for everyone to see. It would be an accident waiting to happen. If there’s going to be a message system, it should be a separate system parallel to the bitcoin network. Messages should not be recorded in the block chain.
This was in response to a proposal for attaching short messages to Bitcoin transactions. Satoshi obviously favored keeping the chain focused on financial transactions, not general messaging or data storage.
So far for my first BIP110 article. It is my impression that many Bitcoiners still have no idea that Satoshi was actually firmly against storing arbitrary data(*) in the Bitcoin blockchain, as it “would be an accident waiting to happen”. This was said by him in relation to text data, but naturally the same goes for, as mentioned before, privileged, copyrighted, illegal, and classified data.
(*) It’s probably best to say ‘additional’ arbitrary data, as Satoshi allowed a tiny text message in the coinbase transaction of a freshly mined block. The consensus limit for this coinbase scriptSig field is 100 bytes total for the arbitrary data portion (after the mandatory BIP34 block height push). Satoshi kicked that tiny text feature off with a message of 69 bytes in the Genesis block on January 3, 2009:
“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”
Up till today this tiny text field is in use by miners (and miners only), while this field has never been expanded or otherwise enlarged, for that matter.
3. "Blocks upgrade paths for LN like LN-Symmetry"
LN-Symmetry (Eltoo) and related covenant improvements are advanced Layer 2 features. The basic rule for Layer 2 features should always be: keep all arbitrary data off-chain, like a well-designed Lightning Network protocol has been doing since inception. Furthermore, BIP110 is explicitly temporary as it expires after ~52,000 blocks, basically about 1 year post-activation. So there is no blocking whatsoever in a permanent sense here.
BIP110 also limits some Taproot constructs (e.g., large control blocks, certain OP_SUCCESS/OP_IF in tapscripts during the limited activation period) to temporarily close spam vectors, meanwhile handing parties the opportunity to keep working on better and more permanent solutions.
Mind you, these tradeoffs have been acknowledged from the start in October 2025, and they have largely been addressed too for the stakeholders involved.
For example, advanced contracts like BitVM may be constrained short-term, but developers can still use testnet, or sidechains, or wait for expiry. Existing native monetary use cases, and existing Lightning Network use cases (standard Taproot, etc.) are preserved and have no hinder of BIP110 whatsoever. BIP448, which is Vortex’s area, can proceed post-expiry or via compatible paths. Again, a one-year pause for something as important as spam mitigation isn’t a permanent block. Bitcoin development has more often than not iterated with temporary measures and upgrades.
4. "Breaks Miniscript"
This is similar to the previous point: we are talking about temporary restrictions on certain tapscript patterns (e.g., OP_IF/NOTIF in executed contexts and large structures). Wallets using arbitrary Miniscript may need updates to split branches into separate tapleaves (which is actually already best practice anyway). Pre-activation UTXOs are permanently grandfathered, while no funds are frozen or becoming permanent unspendable. All existing coins remain fully functional during the period that BIP110 is active. It appears overly dramatic of Vortex to mention the word “breaks” here, because nothing is (permanently) broken, only temporarily blocked.
In other words, this is a targeted, time-limited rule tightening, and certainly not a breakage. When needed, BIP110 proponents will provide further guidance for wallet and other developers.
5. "Destroys Bitcoin’s promise of neutrality and censorship resistance"
First of all, neutrality doesn’t mean "anything goes forever in any shape or form". Bitcoin’s protocol rules have always included protocol consensus and relay policy limits (for example block size, script rules, OP_RETURN and very strict other data fields policies, both in consensus rules as in relay policies). Standard relay and mempool policy filters have discouraged spam since at least 2014; BIP110 moves the most popular abuse vectors from optional policy to temporary consensus-level enforcement during the activation period.
It appears to me that the “neutrality” arguments often come from those profiting from or ideologically favouring data use cases. Bitcoin was designed as peer-to-peer electronic cash, and I only have to point at Satoshi his Bitcoin whitepaper to enforce this simple fact. Resisting arbitrary data bloat preserves that original design envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto.
When it comes to censorship resistance, Vortex has it backwards once more. First of all, filtering contamination that doesn’t belong in the Bitcoin blockchain has nothing to do with ‘censorship’. No native Bitcoin transaction is ever touched by a data spam filter… simply because native Bitcoin financial transactions contain no (additional) arbitrary data.
To add, Bitcoin’s censorship resistance is actually strengthened when it comes to Bitcoin’s monetary use cases: data spam at times raises network fees, it encourages off-chain handling of native financial transactions (which is more censorable, not less!), and it bloats the UTXO set which hurts node decentralisation, the ultimate enforcement layer. By refocusing on money, it reduces reliance on third parties. Data storage competes unfairly with payments because it can be batched and optimised differently compared to native financial transactions.
6. "Only has a 55% threshold which all but guarantees a split"
No, not necessarily. And even if a split is happening, it will be shortlived, not supported by anyone and it is to be expected that the minority split will be quickly abandoned.
Because soft forks tighten rules: upgraded nodes and miners reject invalid blocks because they contain spam data; non-upgraded nodes will accept them. If a strong majority enforces the activation of BIP110, then the chain with tighter rules wins as the valid longest chain. Low thresholds (like 55% for early lock-in) + a mandatory signaling phase reduces the risk compared to no action which is not an option anymore.
Past soft forks (for example SegWit) used signaling and UASF pressure successfully. A split would require significant miner and user divergence, but grandfathering and the temporary nature of BIP110 is minimising and largely avoiding user harm. Critics calling it a "hard fork" misunderstand the definition—it’s not relaxing rules or requiring old nodes to upgrade to follow the chain.
To be fair, activation of BIP110 is not guaranteed, it currently has low support (15% nodes, 1% miners, rounded), which is a showcase for the organic debates going on, before anything else. Mind you, no one in the BIP110 community has the intention to request exchange listings for the BIP110Coin, or whatever name the opponents have for this imaginary situation.
7. "Can only be considered an attack when compared with past SFs [Soft Forks] that had 90%+ threshold"
No. Again an argument where Vortex has it backwards. The actual attack has been ignited by Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin Core is fully responsible for everything that happened after the release of Bitcoin Core v30 in October 2025. It was Bitcoin Core who allowed Bitcoin to become more data spam friendly over time, and when attackers like Ordinals entered the Bitcoin arena in 2023, Bitcoin Core did nothing. Instead, they opened up the data spam floodgates even further in October 2025 with the release of v30.
The 55% consensus number is a deliberate design for this contentious attack issue, balancing activation with signaling. Higher thresholds can and probably will stall needed fixes. It is the wider Bitcoin community debate that determines widespread legitimacy of BIP110 activation, leading to further node adoption. 55% is not just a single number, it is still the majority that is needed for activation of BIP110. In other words, past high(er) thresholds only reflected less contention.
8. "Doesn’t even fix the issue it claims to fix"
BIP110 doesn’t claim to eliminate all spam forever as spammers can indeed fragment data, use other attack vectors, or wait for expiry of the BIP. BIP110 targets the most harmful, contiguous large-data methods that exploded post-2022, it is introducing and restoring policy-like limits at consensus level and signaling priorities that should be worked out further during and after BIP110 being active. Combined with fees, blocksize and social norms being educated, it raises the bar, and the costs, for spammers to execute further chain abuse. As said before, sitting still and doing nothing is not an option anymore.
That said, grandfathering combined with temporary expiry allows for further refinement of the measurements needed to fight data spam. It also buys time to refocus on Bitcoin as money that rejects other use cases, without permanent protocol changes. In that sense, BIP110 can be considered a (temporary) test bed.
Overall: BIP110 is a pragmatic, temporary response to real incentives gone wrong after inscriptions normalised data storage. It prioritises Bitcoin’s monetary properties, node decentralisation, and developer focus—core to long-term censorship resistance and utility. Critics including data ecosystem participants, highlight real tradeoffs (temporary L2/script constraints, activation risks), but exaggerations about hard forks, fund freezing, or total breakage don’t hold up due to grandfathering and temporariness.
The low signaling numbers about a month before the highly anticipated activation of BIP110 shows it’s not dominating; however at minimum it should be considered a market of ideas, good and/or bad, in action. Bitcoin has always thrived on fierce debates, while users still run nodes, they signal or they don’t, or they oppose via their own software. It is a fact though that there is currently no active User Rejected Soft Fork (URSF) to oppose BIP110. Nodes could potentially (but haven’t so far) activate and enforce rejection of a proposed soft fork like BIP110. Consequently, they will reject blocks that do follow the new rules implemented with BIP110, effectively trying to block or counter the original soft fork. Again, this is all currently not happening, making it appear that 15% of the node network is in favour of activation of BIP110, and the other 85% doesn’t care much what will happen. This situation potentially makes activation of BIP110 a no-brainer when a lot of miners make the switch to mine under BIP110 rules.
But ultimately, the debate alone strengthens the protocol when activation happens to fail and the Bitcoin community regroups around another BIP to try again.
And then this.
“BIP-110 is already working and it hasn’t even been activated yet.”
Yeah. Vortex claimed “BIP110 doesn’t even fix the issue it claims to fix”. Unsurprisingly, he was proven wrong again. I have my doubts, but maybe he understands now the beauty of filter maintenance: you have often immediate results of your work.
Because what perhaps not everyone understands, and certainly Vortex not until now: these data scam people are supposed to make amendments. Just as long as needed till they go away to, for example, altcoin project BSV because they figured out that on BSV data storage, the core business of BSV, is unhindered by these pesky Bitcoin maxis, and therefore maintenance free.
Thanks for reading!
