Bitcoin BIP-110 battles begin: Onchain image inscription challenges data-limit proposal

CoinDesk

by Jamie Crawley

March 2, 2026

AI-Generated Deep Dive Summary

Bitcoin’s latest governance clash has heated up with the mining of the first block supporting BIP-110, a proposal aimed at restricting non-financial data on the blockchain. This comes as critics push back by embedding large images in transactions, challenging the core premise of the proposal. The debate centers around whether Bitcoin should enforce strict limits on transaction output sizes and arbitrary data fields to protect its role as a sound monetary infrastructure or remain neutral to broader uses. Proponents of BIP-110 argue that unchecked non-financial data, such as large inscriptions and OP_RETURN payloads, threaten the blockchain’s efficiency and burden node operators. They see this as necessary to preserve Bitcoin’s integrity as a monetary network. However, prominent figures like Blockstream CEO Adam Back warn that such measures could harm Bitcoin’s neutrality and risk splitting the network by prioritizing certain transactions over others. The controversy intensified when a developer inscribed a 66 KB image in a single transaction, demonstrating how large amounts of data can be embedded without relying on OP_RETURN. This act

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Originally published on CoinDesk on 3/2/2026