The Bitcoin agreement governance debate is on the rise again. According to external sources, the Executive Chairman of Strategy, Michael Seller, had recently publicly opposed BIP 110, arguing that the proposal would limit transactions that were still considered valid by consensus and might change the way Bitcoin handled new uses.
The core point of Seller was not to endorse all the inscriptions or non-financial applications, but rather to object to the fact that there was a bottom-level consensus in Bitcoin to judge which transactions that paid the fees and were technically valid were acceptable. In his view, such trade-offs should not be carried out directly by the rules of agreement.
BIP 110 Proposed temporary tightening of part of the transaction function
According to reports, BIP 110, known as “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork”, is intended to introduce temporary consensus restrictions over about a year, covering part of the transaction and script function. Seller noted that the proposal also envisaged an adjusted activation approach and that the miner signal threshold was lower than the previous bitcoin soft fork programme.
He indicated that while UTXO, which had been created prior to the entry into force of the proposal, would not be affected, the programme would still reduce current transactional functions that would have been effective. According to him, this would set a precedent for limiting certain new use scenarios in the future through consensus rules rather than market mechanisms.
The controversy is about neutrality.
One of the important principles of Bitcoin is neutrality, as Seller has repeatedly emphasized in his aide-memoire. In his view, the network itself could not judge whether a transaction data corresponded to pictures, authentication records, financial settlements, certificates, contracts or new applications that had not yet emerged in the future.
That was why he argued that the consensus rule should remain content-neutral rather than limit certain types of technical structures. Otherwise, the layer of agreement may begin to decide indirectly which uses are more “appropriate”, which is inconsistent with the nature of the bitcoin that is open and not subject to licensing.
He advocated a market mechanism to deal with congestion.
It also questioned whether BIP 110 provided a sufficiently clear quantitative basis to demonstrate that it could improve decentrization, nodal costs, payment of fees or network efficiency. In his view, in the absence of measurable gains, consensus-level changes should not be easily promoted.
As an alternative approach, he referred to resource pricing, trade transfer policies, miners ' policies, data cutting and Layer2 development, and suggested that these approaches were better suited to deal with the use of network resources without the need to change the Bitcoin bottom consensus.
Seller also expressed concern about the governance process itself. In his view, the agreement should be based on broad consensus among developers, miners, nodal operators, exchanges, enterprises, trustees and currency holders. The same approach could be extended to other applications in the future if a consensus rule could be used today to suppress an effective trade.