Saylor Casts Bitcoin’s Code as a “Constitution,” Expands Fight Beyond BIP-110 to Covenants and Bigger Blocks

Michael Saylor just widened the battlefield. After weeks attacking BIP-110, he’s now arguing that changing Bitcoin’s base layer—whether through temporary data limits, covenants, or larger blocks—amounts to violating a constitutional order that protects users’ economic rights.

His X thread, spread across nine posts, reframes the fight: the risk isn’t hostile outsiders, but internal coalitions that manufacture reasons to rewrite rules and redistribute power. Last week he published a 110-point critique of BIP-110; today he’s grouping that proposal with covenants and blocksize increases as separate methods that deliver the same outcome: one faction imposing costs and risks on everyone else.

What’s actually on the table - BIP-110 (“Reduced Data Temporary Softfork”) would curtail non-financial payloads—such as Ordinals inscriptions—for roughly a year. Its mandatory signaling window opens around August 9 at block 961,632. Miner signaling is ~2.64%, far short of the 55% needed for activation. - Covenants would add script constraints that predefine how coins can be spent later—new functionality with serious design trade-offs. - Larger-block ideas target higher throughput by fitting more data per block, shifting validation and storage burdens.

BIP-110’s leading proponent is the pseudonymous Dathon Ohm; veteran developer Luke Dashjr contributed to the original draft. Support clusters around an “anti-spam” cohort (including Bitcoin Knots users and some node operators) who want Bitcoin to prioritize peer-to-peer money over permanent storage of tokens, images, and arbitrary data. Their case: miners earn one-time fees from bulky payloads while full nodes shoulder lasting storage, bandwidth, and validation costs. They frame it as stewarding scarce blockspace rather than censoring valid transactions.

A notable critique pushes back on Saylor’s framing: grouping BIP-110, covenants, and larger blocks conflates three very different directions—restricting data types, adding programmable constraints, and expanding capacity. The commonality is only that each changes base-layer rules; the constituencies and objectives are not the same.

The real contest is over narrative authority Saylor’s “constitution” metaphor is strategic. By elevating consensus rules to a rights-preserving charter, he sets a high bar for any base-layer modification. That moves the debate from “does this optimize performance?” to “who gets to redefine property guarantees?” In a system where social consensus ultimately decides upgrades, a rights-based narrative can be more durable than a technical argument.

- Technical lens: A conservative base layer minimizes attack surface and ossifies guarantees users depend on. Yet Bitcoin also evolves through rare, carefully scoped soft forks. BIP-110 is temporary and aims to prune non-financial bloat; covenants could unlock powerful self-custody and recovery patterns; larger blocks trade validator costs for throughput. Each path touches different failure modes—censorship risk, complexity creep, or centralization pressure. - Incentives and business reality: Fee market design determines who pays for expressiveness. Ordinals and similar uses can buoy miner revenue, but externalize long-term node costs. Anti-spam advocates want to price or exclude certain payloads at the protocol level; markets-first thinkers prefer letting fees and mempool policy do the filtering. Changing rules picks winners: miners vs node operators, builders vs purists, short-term fee spikes vs long-term decentralization. - Social dynamics: Rights framing appeals to risk-averse holders who prioritize predictability over experimentation. It also disciplines would-be reformers: if any change is cast as rights erosion, neutral middle-ground evaporates. On the flip side, overextending the metaphor can chill necessary maintenance and hamper credible paths to better security or user safety. - Ethics of consent: Calling changes an “imposition” surfaces a real question—what threshold constitutes legitimate consent in Bitcoin? BIP-110 sets a 55% miner signaling requirement for activation, but miners do not equal users. Node adoption, wallet defaults, and exchange behavior often decide what chain markets recognize. The constitution is social long before it is code.

Where this likely goes With signaling at 2.64% and the window opening around block 961,632, BIP-110 appears unlikely to activate soon. But Saylor’s campaign isn’t about one proposal anymore; it’s about entrenching a doctrine of minimal, necessity-driven changes at the base layer. That doctrine, if it holds, pushes innovation to second layers and client policy while punishing anything that looks like scope creep.

Watch miner signaling, but watch the rhetoric more closely. In Bitcoin, governance outcomes often follow the story that best preserves credibility with users. Saylor is betting that constitutional language will keep the foundation tight and the ambition layered.