Arch CTO Himanshu Sahay Says Bitcoin Validates Rules, Not Motives, as BIP-110 Rift Deepens

A Fault Line in Bitcoin Philosophy

Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor’s argument pushing back against BIP-110 has stepped directly into one of the most polarizing philosophical fault lines Bitcoin has seen in years. He argued that weaponizing consensus changes to police blockspace sets a perilous precedent of censorship and risks invalidating otherwise legitimate, fee-paying transactions.

Saylor’s fierce pushback instantly ignited a firestorm across the ecosystem, drawing sharp, immediate friction from factions who accused the Strategy founder of harboring a messiah complex—a trait they warn could fracture the network’s decentralized ethos. Simultaneously, his remarks alienated the very bedrock of the network: purist node operators already buckling under skyrocketing transaction fees and an increasingly bloated blockchain, who fiercely condemned his dismissive stance.

To them, dismissing ordinals traffic as “no problem” ignored the practical realities of small-scale users being priced out of on-chain transactions. Some accused Saylor of looking at Bitcoin purely through an institutional, “store-of-value” lens rather than caring about its utility as a peer-to-peer cash network.

Despite the vocal pushback from the ranks, Saylor’s underlying technical warning appeared to align him with heavyweight veteran cypherpunks, including Blockstream CEO Adam Back and core developers like Greg Maxwell and Peter Todd. They agreed that trying to push BIP-110 via a user-activated soft fork without broad miner consensus was reckless and highly likely to split the network into two competing chains.

A Call for Protocol Agnosticism

Others in the space called for a return to first principles. Himanshu Sahay, co-founder and CTO at Arch, emphasized the necessity of a calculated, emotionless assessment of BIP-110 over tribal alignment behind any single voice. Addressing Saylor’s assertion that economic demand alone defines transaction validity, Sahay told Bitcoin.com News that at the consensus layer, Bitcoin deliberately operates without a moral compass—remaining entirely indifferent to the nature of the data being anchored to its ledger.

“Consensus verifies whether a transaction satisfies the protocol’s rules,” Sahay said. “It doesn’t determine whether the underlying use case is financially meaningful or whether someone else considers it spam.”

According to Sahay, this is the reason much of this debate exists outside consensus. While valid, these conversations are different from changing the rules that determine whether a transaction is valid, he added.

While BIP-110 faces enormous opposition, there is a possibility that some miners will still opt to activate it anyway, thus raising the possibility of yet another chain split. Still, initiating the split does not guarantee that the fork will garner enough support across the wider ecosystem.

“Until there’s meaningful alignment across those groups, it’s difficult to predict the outcome with confidence,” Sahay said. “Most institutional infrastructure providers prioritize stability and operational certainty, so any decision to support a forked asset would likely be based on factors such as security, liquidity, customer demand and ecosystem adoption rather than the technical proposal alone.”