In the quiet aftermath of the ETF approval, as institutional liquidity begins its slow seep into Bitcoin’s deep tissue, a peculiar noise emerged from the governance layer. Not a price movement. Not a hack. A proposal. BIP 110, a technical artifact proposing transaction filtering on the base layer, was met with a 0% miner support rate. And then Michael Saylor, the high priest of corporate Bitcoin accumulation, publicly opposed it, framing it as a threat to Bitcoin’s neutrality. On the surface, this is a minor governance squabble. But if you look at the liquidity flows—both of capital and of consensus—this event is a stress test of Bitcoin’s most fragile assumption: that its rules can remain economically neutral while its participants are anything but.
Let’s rewind the tape. BIP 110 is a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal that, in essence, seeks to give miners and nodes the ability to filter out specific types of transactions—targeting the data-heavy inscriptions of the Ordinals protocol. The stated goal: reclaim block space for ‘financial’ transactions, preserving the original vision of ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash.’ The unstated reality: it is a technical mechanism to enforce a subjective value judgment on what constitutes legitimate use of the ledger. The proposal has zero public miner support. Not one signaling block. Zero percent. That is not a failure of persuasion; it is a liquidity event of economic consensus. Miners, who are the ultimate arbiters of state finality, have voted with their hashrate to maintain the current state of affairs—a state where any transaction paying the fee is valid, regardless of its content.
And then enters Saylor. He argues that implementing such a filter would ‘politicize the rules,’ turning Bitcoin from a neutral settlement layer into a subjective network capable of censorship. His statement is elegant and reinforces the narrative of Bitcoin as digital gold—immutable, apolitical, a refuge from human judgment. On the surface, it aligns with the libertarian ethos that birthed the asset. But my work analyzing capital flows during the 2017 ICO frenzy taught me one thing: narratives are often the most expensive form of liquidity. Saylor’s MicroStrategy holds over 200,000 BTC. His opposition is not purely philosophical; it is a hedge against any change that could erode the ‘store of value’ premium that his entire corporate balance sheet depends on. The 0% miner support is also not purely ideological. Since the Ordinals boom, miners have earned millions in additional fees. Filtering those out would be a direct revenue cut. The illusion of moral neutrality is sustained by the liquidity of self-interest.
This is where the market misreads the situation. The consensus view is that Bitcoin’s neutrality is secure because the proposal failed. The contrarian angle is that the failure itself reveals a dangerous dependency. Bitcoin’s governance is not some democratic utopia; it is a plutocratic consensus where two power blocs—capital (Saylor) and production (miners)—converged on a status quo that benefits both. Chaos is just liquidity waiting for a narrative. But what happens when their interests diverge? Imagine a scenario where Ordinals congestion drives transaction fees so high that normal financial transfers become uneconomical. Retail users scream. Lightning Network proponents argue for L2 adoption. A new BIP emerges, now backed by a coalition of transaction-heavy users and a subset of miners who see a long-term threat to usability. Then the 0% becomes 51%. And suddenly, the politicalization that Saylor fears becomes inevitable. The liquidity of consensus will follow the path of least resistance, not the path of principle.
Liquidity is the only truth in a world of noise. And the truth here is that Bitcoin’s base layer is still economically neutral only because the dominant economic actors find it profitable to keep it so. The moment that equation tips, the governance will tip with it. The debate over BIP 110 is a ghost of future cycles—a rehearsal for a moment when the choice between ‘neutrality’ and ‘usability’ becomes impossible to defer. For now, the network holds. Ordinals breathe. The ETF liquidity drips. But the architecture of consensus is more fragile than the code. It relies on the alignment of capital and production. And alignment, as any macro watcher knows, is not a permanent state—it is a condition that must be continuously renewed through the liquidity of belief.
Positioning for this cycle means watching not the price of Bitcoin, but the fee market for Ordinals. If median transaction fees rise above the threshold of economic friction for normal users—roughly $20 per transaction—expect the ghost of BIP 110 to walk again. And when it does, the question will not be whether Bitcoin should be neutral, but whether any system built on human consensus can afford to be.
