The Battle for Bitcoin: Where I Stand on BIP-110 | Simon Dixon

BIP-110, the Spam War, and the Battle Nobody Wants to Name: Where I Stand

Jul 24, 2026

This is a long read. It is my honest attempt to answer a question a lot of you have been asking me: where do I actually stand on BIP-110, the “spam war,” and the fight over Bitcoin Core? I am going to give you the game theory, follow the money on all sides, walk through exactly what happens over the next year, and then tell you what I am doing and why. I am not going to tell you I know how this ends. Anyone who tells you they know how this ends is selling you something.

Where I stand, in one breath

I already run a Bitcoin Knots node. That was a choice about which implementation I trust, and I made it before this latest fight came to a head.

What people are actually asking me now is different: where I stand on BIP-110 — the soft-fork proposal that has revived the old activation war and forced the question of who really sets Bitcoin’s rules. So let me answer directly, then earn the answer over the rest of this piece.

Ideologically, I am aligned with what BIP-110 represents: node operators demonstrating that corporate capture of Bitcoin can be resisted, the way we demonstrated it in 2017. I have concerns about BIP-110 as a specific mechanism. I have far graver concerns about the current state of Bitcoin Core. And I have concerns about the actors circling both camps. I am not tribal about this, and by the end I hope you will see why refusing to be tribal is the whole point — and why, in the end, I think Bitcoin needs to go through this to come out stronger.

One thing I want clear from the very first line, though, so the rest reads correctly: my conviction in Bitcoin itself is total, and has been since 2011 — that is not what is in question here. Let me be precise about what “total” means, because I am not a blind loyalist: I am with Bitcoin unless it is actually captured by the Financial Industrial Complex and stops being money that individuals control. That is not something I expect to happen, and I think we are a long way from it even though they are clearly trying. But my loyalty is to Bitcoin-as-sovereign-money, not to a ticker — if the thing were ever truly captured, the commitment would be to the properties, not the brand. What I am actively deciding in this piece is narrower and more specific: my conviction in BIP-110 as a mechanism for pushing back against the capture of Bitcoin Core. That is the vote I am casting. The caution in this piece is about how this particular fight resolves tactically — never about whether I stand with Bitcoin, and never about whether the community should push back. I do, and it should.

1. The frame: this is a strategy of tension

Before the technical weeds, the lens I look through, because without it my “concerns about both sides” will sound like fence-sitting.

I do not believe the most important thing happening in Bitcoin is a disagreement about data in blocks. I believe it is a strategy of tension — the pattern the historians of the Cold War called Operation Gladio. The essence of a strategy of tension is not that you back one side and beat the other. It is that you quietly involve yourself on both sides of a conflict, let the conflict itself do the damage, and position yourself to benefit from — and steer — whatever outcome emerges. The division is not a side effect. The division is the operation.

Let me be careful and precise, because this is exactly the kind of claim that makes people stop reading. I am not asserting that a single named person runs a control room. I am describing a structural pattern, and I am telling you honestly that it is my reading of it, not something I can place before a court. Where I name people and money below, I show you what is documented, mark clearly what is my interpretation, and carry the denials. Hold me to that.

Once you see Bitcoin’s civil wars through this lens, the question changes. It stops being “which side is right?” and becomes “who benefits from the war itself, and who benefits from each possible ending?” That is what this article is really about.

2. I have seen this movie before: Hong Kong, New York, and 2017

I am not analysing this from the outside. I lived it.

In February 2016, a group of Bitcoin Core developers and the major miners met in Hong Kong and signed the Hong Kong Agreement — a roadmap to activate Segregated Witness as a soft fork and then follow it with a 2MB hard fork. I was at the Hong Kong event. It was, for all its flaws, a genuine attempt at consensus between developers and miners.

It fell apart. Which side reneged is still contested — the big-block camp says Core never delivered the promised hard fork; the Core developers argued they had only agreed to propose one, not force it, because they do not control the network. I will not pretend I can cleanly assign blame. Hold that...