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Bitcoin's trading in the green on the week, which is notable, as this performance came in the face of Michael Saylor's Strategy selling another +$100M chunk of BTC between Aug. 3rd and Aug. 9th.
The OG coin has been undeterred. Yet sell pressure isn't the only thing Bitcoin has shrugged off in recent days. The network's war over NFT "spam" seems to have finally ended, and in favor of the NFTers.
Posting here because I suspect most of my crypto followers outside of Bitcoin don’t know this.
— Eric Wall (@ercwl) August 8, 2026
Today, the long JPEG spam war on Bitcoin will end.
What has happened over the last few years is that the Bitcoin maximalists who were driven insane by the JPEG spam circa 2023-2024…
I previously wrote about this intensifying schism last October, when Bitcoin Core's v30 release reignited the fight over whether Ordinals, Runes, and other "non-monetary" data belonged onchain.
Back then, the forking talk from Ordinals critics was still just talk. This past weekend, it became a short-lived fork attempt.
This effort was dubbed BIP-110, a proposed soft fork meant to restrict non-financial data in Bitcoin transactions. It needed 55% miner signaling to lock in, though it only got roughly 2.5%. Nodes backing BIP-110 split off from the main chain this past Saturday, mined two blocks, then stalled out while Bitcoin proper pulled dozens of blocks ahead.
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Bitcoin worked exactly as designed. BIP-110 was free to fork, and the network was free not to follow. The result was decisive: about 99.85% of Bitcoin's hashpower stayed with Bitcoin. The BIP-110 branch mined only two blocks and is already more than 80 blocks behind.
— Michael Saylor (@saylor) August 9, 2026
It's true that even if BIP-110 was successful, it wouldn't have been that effective at stopping Ordinals and the like. But what has been established is the lack of consensus for policing Bitcoin's blockspace in this way. BIP-110 was an opportunity for change, yet the vast majority of the Bitcoin community demonstrated they don't want that type of change.
So is the fight done? Surely some in the BIP-110 faction will try to muster up a new response later. Whether that retry would be any more successful remains to be seen. It seems entirely likely that this failed fork over the weekend will be the high-water mark of this movement. So there may be more chapters to come here, yes, but the biggest fireworks may be over.
In contrast, there is another planned fork coming up that isn't trying to vie for dominance of Bitcoin but rather to break out as an entirely new experiment. That project is eCash, and it's rolling out in phases through Oct. 31st. It will be an independent chain snapshotted from Bitcoin's ledger but recentered around Drivechains.
That said, eCash has taken the opposite approach compared to BIP-110. Instead of imposing new rules on Bitcoin from within, it's just leaving and building its own space next door.
Of course, the BIP-110ers are free to do the same if they truly can't stomach NFTs atop Bitcoin. The choice is theirs, as the Bitcoin community has already made its decision too. The NFTs are staying.
