Michael Saylor Says Bitcoin’s Greatest Threat Comes From Within

• Michael Saylor says Bitcoin’s biggest threat now comes from internal governance.
• Saylor warns changing Bitcoin’s rules could weaken its long-term security.
• BIP-110 nears signaling, but 2.64% support trails the 55% threshold. 

Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor argued that Bitcoin’s biggest risk is no longer governments, regulators or competing cryptocurrencies. Instead, he said the greatest danger comes from changes to Bitcoin’s own consensus rules as developers debate future protocol upgrades.

Saylor’s comments come as the debate around Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-110 approaches a key milestone, with its mandatory signaling window expected to begin around August 9.

Saylor Says Bitcoin Must Protect Its Rules

Saylor said Bitcoin has won and now it must survive victory. He described Bitcoin’s consensus rules as the network’s constitution, saying they define ownership, scarcity, settlement and economic rights. According to Saylor, changing those rules to satisfy any particular group would undermine the rights of every participant, from miners and developers to investors, custodians and companies.

He warned that if one faction succeeds in rewriting the protocol, others will attempt the same, creating permanent governance battles over Bitcoin’s future.

Saylor argued that prolonged disputes could drive capital away from the network, weaken security, slow innovation and prevent Bitcoin from reaching its long-term potential.

BIP-110 Debate Moves Into Focus

Although Saylor has repeatedly criticized BIP-110, his latest comments expanded beyond a single proposal.

BIP-110 is a proposed temporary soft fork designed to restrict certain forms of arbitrary data stored on Bitcoin for about one year. Supporters say the proposal reduces blockchain bloat, lowers storage and validation costs for node operators, and keeps Bitcoin focused on financial transactions instead of Ordinals, tokens, and other non-payment data.

Saylor disagrees with that approach. He argues that Bitcoin should not use consensus rules to decide which valid, fee-paying transactions deserve block space. In his view, restricting those transactions amounts to changing the network’s economic rules rather than simply reducing spam.

He also criticized covenant proposals and larger block proposals, saying each introduces different risks. According to Saylor, covenants increase protocol complexity and create new attack surfaces, while larger blocks reduce block-space scarcity and increase the hardware and bandwidth costs required to validate the network.

BIP-110’s mandatory signaling window is expected to open around block 961,632 in early August. Current miner support remains around 2.64%, well below the 55% threshold required for activation.

Miner Economics Remain Central

Saylor tied the governance debate directly to Bitcoin’s long-term security model. He added that Bitcoin’s block subsidy falls every 210,000 blocks, making transaction fees increasingly important for miner revenue. 

If protocol changes reduce competition for block space, fee income could decline over time, weakening the financial incentives that secure the network.

His preferred approach is to keep Bitcoin’s base layer simple, neutral and stable while allowing additional functionality to be built on second-layer networks instead of changing the core protocol.

Saylor also warned that a single rule introduced today could limit future financial products, technologies and markets that have not yet been created. 

He believes Bitcoin could eventually grow 100-fold and become a foundation for global capital markets, making governance decisions far more significant than they appear today.

Related: Saylor: Bitcoin Is the Solution to a Monetary System Destined to Lose Value