BIP 110 Formalizes the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork Proposal
BIP 110 was formally assigned on December 3, 2025, placing the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork into Bitcoin's BIP process as a consensus proposal. The proposal sought temporary consensus-level limits on arbitrary data and became an early formal stage of the governance dispute that intensified in 2026.
On December 3, 2025, BIP editors formally assigned BIP 110 to the “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork,” a proposal attributed to the pseudonymous Dathon Ohm. The proposal sought a temporary soft fork that would impose consensus-level restrictions on certain forms of arbitrary data in Bitcoin transactions. Its motivation was explicitly tied to the controversy over expanding support for arbitrary data and to the argument that Bitcoin's incentives and scarce block space should remain focused on monetary use.
The distinction between policy and consensus was at the center of the proposal. Node relay policy can determine which transactions a particular node prefers to relay or mine without making those transactions invalid under Bitcoin's consensus rules. BIP 110 instead proposed making specified data restrictions part of consensus for a temporary period. That raised the stakes considerably: a successful deployment would affect what blocks all enforcing nodes considered valid rather than merely changing default mempool behavior.
The proposal emerged from the dispute surrounding Bitcoin Core 30 and its relaxation of the long-standing default OP_RETURN relay limit. BIP 110's deployment design used a modified BIP9-style signaling process, with a start time corresponding to the beginning of December. The BIP's assignment on December 3 marked the proposal's formal entry into Bitcoin's governance record, while the surrounding signaling period remained part of the same developing controversy.
At the time, BIP 110 was still a proposal—not an activated soft fork or a Bitcoin consensus change. Its historical importance comes from what it formalized: a competing vision of how users, miners, node operators, Bitcoin Core, and alternative implementations should respond to contested non-monetary data use. The dispute would become much more consequential in 2026, but December 2025 was the point at which that governance argument acquired a formal BIP identity and an explicit consensus mechanism.