BIP-110 Collapses at 2% While Quantum Signatures Land on Mainnet
Miners reject the year's fiercest soft-fork campaign by overwhelming margins, even as independent researchers demonstrate post-quantum transactions on mainnet using existing script opcodes.
The loudest Bitcoin fight of the year ended with about 2% of miners signaling for it.
After months of polarized community debate over transaction metadata and arbitrary payload restrictions, the proposal to enforce strict trial caps collapsed as mining pools decisively passed on signaling.
BIP-110 wanted to cap arbitrary data in transactions for a one year trial. Adam Back called it a downgrade. Michael Saylor published a hundred and ten reasons against it. The signaling window opened in August against a 55% early lock in threshold, and support sat at roughly 2%. Measured by volume it was a war. Measured by consensus it was a rounding error.
The failure highlights an enduring structural reality of Bitcoin governance: social volume does not translate into economic consensus. Yet while soft-fork activation mechanisms remain conservative, cryptographic progress continues unhindered on the live chain.
In block 964199, an unannounced mainnet broadcast proved that long-standing worries over post-quantum vulnerability can be tackled today without altering a single consensus rule:
Two Starkware researchers broadcast a quantum resistant Bitcoin transaction on mainnet, in block 964199, using hash based one time signatures built from script opcodes that already exist. No consensus change. No soft fork. Nobody had to ask Bitcoin Core for anything.
The transaction utilized Lamport-style hash-based one-time signatures constructed from existing Script operations, proving that forward-looking security upgrades do not require permission or contentious soft forks.
It is about five times the size of a normal transaction, so at fifty sats a byte it stings. At one sat a byte it is nothing. And if the alternative is being quantum vulnerable, that is a price worth paying. The headline is not the cost. It is that this was possible the whole time.
