Bitcoin's BIP 110 Fork Proposal Fails; Market Sell-Off and Macro Update
A solo presenter from Digital Asset News covers the rejection of the BIP 110 Bitcoin fork proposal, Monday market conditions, and miner sell-off activity.
Summary
The host of Digital Asset News opens with the news that BIP 110, a proposed Bitcoin soft fork aimed at restricting non-financial data on the blockchain, has been rejected after failing to achieve the required 55% miner signaling threshold — receiving under 3% support. He explains what the proposal was, why it failed, and why he believes it poses no serious threat to Bitcoin. He also covers his own Monday DCA Bitcoin purchase, notes that hedge funds on the CME have flipped long on Bitcoin (per analyst Ted Pillows), and discusses significant Bitcoin sell-offs by Mara and Strategy. The episode closes with a live Q&A covering topics including Puerto Rico's ongoing water crisis and its impact on tourism and residents, the host's ranked preferences for crypto storage (favoring Trezor for self-custody, with warnings about iTrustCapital withdrawal delays), a historical recap of major exchange collapses (Mt. Gox, Celsius, Voyager, FTX, BlockFi), and brief altcoin sentiment.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
BIP 110 Fork Rejected — What It Means
Looks like there's going to be no Bitcoin fork, as BIP 110 was rejected. We're going to take a look at what that actually means and also look at a little bit of the macro.
Before getting into BIP 110, here's a little breaking news which should surprise nobody. Iran, with the little war going on with the United States, has declared it will keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and rejects any future deal with Trump. This is not really breaking news — this seems to happen every single week. However, the most interesting detail here, per Iranian outlets and an adviser to the Parliament Speaker, is that Iran says it will wait until Trump's term ends in 2029 to restart negotiations. So we'll see how that works out over the next two years or so, and expect a little more volatility.
Market Overview — Monday Red Day
Today is a red day and we're down a little bit. Bitcoin's down 1.5%, Ethereum down 2.5%. Across the board, market cap is actually up. However, traditional markets are also down. SpaceX is down a little today, Caterpillar, Nvidia — Tesla's up. Cloudflare is one of my favorites right now. We can see that traditional markets are mixed. Some do well, some don't. Some take the news in, but some have earnings reports like Cloudflare, and things are doing quite well there. But it is still down 0.8%. That's what we have going on today.
Monday DCA — Dynamic Buying Rules
Of course, it's Monday, so I buy Bitcoin every single Monday morning. Last week the risk levels were below 0.3. When I bought, it was at $62,634. As we've talked about dynamically DCAing, I actually doubled up what I purchased last week on my usual Monday on the Cash App. Today, because the risk levels are above 0.299 — at 0.36 at $63,893 — I actually had to reduce the amount of what I was buying in Bitcoin. As a reminder, as the price goes down, I will continue to buy more, and at heavier amounts.
Also as a reminder, I still think it's a pretty good time to get into Bitcoin. We could see another drop off, but as far as moving averages go, we are just slightly below the 200 EMA at $64K. We're at $63.79. I think this is a pretty good time, but this cannot be investment advice. Let me know what you think in the comments.
BIP 110 Explained — What Just Happened
Now let's get into BIP 110. A friend of mine, Army Piper, did a great summary of what this all is, because even I get it wrong. I was watching Matthew Crowder from Bitcoin University and he had some good points, and it sounded very reasonable about what was going on. I actually agreed with what BIP 110 was trying to do. There were a lot of issues they were trying to correct. It's just — this is how Bitcoin works. It is a democracy, and we're going to see how many people want to move it and how many do not. We can't just be the voice of the minority. We have to move forward.
If you want to follow Army Piper, links are in the description. And after we go over this, if you want a deeper explanation, follow one of the smartest guys I think in Bitcoin — Simon Dixon — and how he essentially says, look, it was a good experiment, it didn't work out, got to move forward, Bitcoin still works, very happy. So don't see this as the end-all be-all, and don't let people tell you this is going to destroy Bitcoin. It's not.
So — BIP 110 fork, what the heck just happened? What is it? Well, it's not a quantum security upgrade. I know people would want that, but that's not what it was. It was a proposal to temporarily restrict certain non-financial data. And this was the big thing I didn't want to see — a bunch of inscriptions, tokens, the non-financial stuff that's actually in there, the runes, kind of like the NFTs of Bitcoin. I didn't really think we needed that, but people voted and they said, "Yeah, we're going to keep it on." The goal was to keep Bitcoin focused on money, reduce blockchain bloat, and move forward.
However, Bitcoin, I believe, is more of a store of value than a medium of exchange, and more people are using it as such. I'm going to ask you guys a question — I want you to answer this in the comments right now. How many of you in the last one year have used Bitcoin for a transaction purpose? Meaning, you used it to buy something. I don't care if it was a cup of coffee, unlikely, or a car or a house or whatever you had to buy. I just want to see how many of you have actually used Bitcoin as a transactional peer-to-peer. Just curious.
What happened? BIP 110 needed 55% miner signaling to activate. That did not happen. It got roughly under 3%. Everybody else said, "Nope, don't want it." There was a soft fork — looks like there was a little bit of mining going on in that direction — but the majority of miners are going to reject it and they're not going to go through with it. That means there is no fork.
So what does it mean for Bitcoin? Bitcoin is operating. The overwhelming majority of hash power remains with the real Bitcoin chain. Exchanges, wallets, and economic activity remain on the main chain. BIP 110 has very little hash power. You can still do it, but you take a risk. The minority BIP 110 chain lacks proper replay protection. If you try to sell or move coins onto that chain, your transaction could be replayed on the real Bitcoin chain, causing you to lose said Bitcoin. Just hold your Bitcoin.
As for price impact — not really much of a thing. We're going to see some sell-offs, and we'll take a look at Mara and Strategy. But as far as the bottom line, this is a small minority breaking away. They gave it a good run, but people have voted with their feet — or with what they're mining — and they're saying, "We're not doing this." That's pretty much where we are.
What do the supporters say? What do the critics say? Supporters say: Bitcoin is money, not permanent cloud storage. Make arbitrary data harder and more expensive to embed. Refocus Bitcoin on its primary purpose — again, peer-to-peer transaction versus store of value. I have to tell you, there are some disturbing things being stored on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Critics say: Bitcoin can't determine what data means. You're restricting transaction structures, not limiting arbitrary data. Workarounds will appear. Why are we doing this? And that's where we actually are.
Again, if you want to go deeper, a great person to follow would be Simon Dixon over on X. He's also got a YouTube channel and gives a very detailed summary. I'll just say this: tried, didn't work out. Come back at it again.
Mara and Strategy Sell-Offs
The sell-off is not a big thing. Taking a look at the price action — not too bad today, even given what's going on macroeconomically and with the BIP 110 issue.
Mara, one of the large Bitcoin miners, in the first half of 2026 sold a total of 23,093 Bitcoin — that's a lot, $1.6 billion worth — in the first half of 2026 at an average price of $70,000. They actually did better than Strategy. Mara still holds 35,577 Bitcoin, but they sold a boatload. That's roughly 40% of their holdings, and this is coming from SEC filings.
My question was: how much revenue did they get from Bitcoin as opposed to the AI infrastructure they're doing right now? There's a shareholder letter, and if you take a look at the actual revenue, it's all Bitcoin. They have some contracts in the wings with AI, space, energy, computation, data centers — that's going to come later. What I see in this shareholder letter is the majority came from Bitcoin.
I don't think they're going to give up. But even if they do give up and start to say, "We don't really want to do everything in Bitcoin mining" — fantastic. That means the difficulty level drops. That means it's easier for the average mom-and-pop Bitcoin miner to actually mint a block. Maybe we see a resurgence in Bitcoin mining for the plebs like ourselves. I need to get my friend Andy on the show, as he has been a Bitcoin miner for quite some time and specializes in home Bitcoin mining.
Strategy also sold off today. On August 10th, looks like they sold 1,690 Bitcoin — not too bad — at an average Bitcoin price of $64,000. As a reminder, that's what Strategy does. They have to sell off. They have to pay their dividends for STRK. But as a quick reminder, Strategy did a pretty good job in the beginning. The first time they bought, they bought 21,400 Bitcoin at an average price of $11,652. That is so low. Then they bought at $16,000, $19,000, $21,000, $31,000, $33,000. They're still above water. I think they're doing just fine. People say they're going to collapse — they're going to be able to pay those dividends for a very long time. We'll see how it works out. It didn't seem to affect the market, just like it's done the last four times.
Hedge Funds Flip Long on Bitcoin
Some good news from Ted Pillows — another good follow. Hedge funds on the CME are now long on Bitcoin. It is amazing how that works out. Hedge funds like to do this thing called buy low and sell high, and apparently they've flipped. This happened in April 2025 and March 2026, and in both instances Bitcoin rallied 30% or more. I don't think Bitcoin can necessarily rally that much depending on our time frame, but in the long haul I think we'll be just fine. I think we're going to have another bull run at some point.
But as a quick reminder — just as we saw with Coldcard and all the different hacks going on — it is not how much you make, it is how much you keep. If you're not protecting yourself, it's going to be a really rocky road. I've seen a bunch of posts about people who lost everything because of hacks, wrench attacks, or whatever. Do me a favor — diversify a little bit of where you're at. You don't have to put it all on a Ledger, you don't have to put it all into a Trezor, but maybe move some things around so you don't get caught short.
Live Q&A
Host: Just posted — Sailor, six years ago today, Strategy made its first Bitcoin purchase. "Thank you to our shareholders in the Bitcoin company for joining us on this journey and your courage."
I was giving Michael a lot of guff because of what he said — "never sell your Bitcoin." And of course people would scream at me and say he wasn't talking about Strategy, he was talking about you and your Bitcoin and his Bitcoin, which he will never sell. I get it, I got it before, and I understand now. But I was trying to convince a lot of people to take some profits and they would not listen to me because Michael Saylor said so. I'm like — Michael Saylor is a billionaire, and you're not. So maybe you should take a little bit of profits and pay off some debts. Maybe have a vacation, because you earned it. You've got stress in your life. Take some profits and go enjoy what life is supposed to give you. And people are like, "Nope, I'm going to curl up with this Bitcoin." Okay, well, whatever you want to do. Saylor can do what he wants because he's in another universe, and we can do what we want to do.
Do I have Solana? I do have some of that and I hope it does pretty well. Lately I've been looking more at my stock portfolio and I've been more excited about that than the crypto side. That was never me. Thankfully I found Ivan on Tech — shout out to him. He's got a good program to dabble your feet into different stocks, moving averages, and maybe little trades here and there. But that's not a talk for this channel. Mostly we'll just stay with crypto. But Solana is looking hopefully reasonably good.
There was a story, I think it was in Florida, about a family that got kidnapped just recently — and it wasn't even for a lot. It was like for $10,000, which for some people is a lot of money, but for me to get out of bed and wrench attack somebody, it better be a lot of money. Apparently they were rescued, but that's how bad it is out there.
Going back to the question about using Bitcoin as peer-to-peer transactions — are you using Bitcoin to buy things? Because I didn't, unfortunately. But I'd rather use it for payments than as NFT storage. The last time I used Bitcoin for payments, it was Cash App. They offered you like $25 in Bitcoin if you just went and bought something with Bitcoin. On the app you could look at the map and find different places that took Bitcoin. So I went down — there was a place called Papoose's — and I was like, "Hey, do you guys take Bitcoin?" And they had to get the manager, and he's like, "Yeah, yeah, we do," but it was obviously a very non-regular type of thing. That was like three or four months ago. Before that, probably two years ago.
Ashley says 99% of the people don't care about BIP 110. Let me tell you — the ones that do care about BIP 110 care about it a lot. They'll lambast you if you don't talk about it and say how great it is. But 97% of people don't want it. There's a hint.
I use a card to pay all my business expenses and I've accumulated a lot more than I thought I would. Robin Hood offers a debit card too. I also have a MetaMask debit card — 4% cash back, not too bad. I'm still trying to get my X account card, but since I live in Puerto Rico, they don't want to give me one.
Puerto Rico Water Crisis
Rob asks: how's the water crisis in Puerto Rico affecting you? You would think on an island that rains a lot, you wouldn't have so much of a water crisis. Right now we're rationing water. There are two different zones — zone one versus zone two — and roughly within 24 to 48 hours they shut your water off because they have to conserve it. People say, "Is that climate change?" No, it's been dry, that's true, but you're on an island. Desalination plants can work pretty well if they actually operate and function. Also, the piping is awful. The infrastructure is horrendous, and that is an issue with Puerto Rico.
People are fantastic, there's great living, and once they get this fixed — which I think hopefully will be relatively soon — not too bad. It doesn't affect me so much right now because I'm not there yet. I go back on Sunday. But what it affects is everybody who is there vacationing. It is a massive tourist attraction, and if you lose the tourists, your economy is going to take a massive hit. So water kind of needs to get done. They have water trucks to fill up these cisterns and it's quite an issue.
If you're thinking about moving to Puerto Rico, where would I recommend living? It depends on who you are. I remember Jason Appleton — you guys know him as Crypto Crow — he moved there. I think it was Vieques, and it's kind of like a sleepy surfer town. He wasn't a fan of it. He also wasn't a fan of ocean and beach life. But depending on what you like — if you like parties and want to be around a bunch of tourists and people from the mainland, San Juan would be a pretty good one. If you despise people and want to stay away from them, there are a lot of different places to go. If I were you and you were coming in, probably an easy place to start is a place called Guabo, where I live sometimes, and sometimes in San Juan. That's a good place to start and then just go around the island and see which ones you like. Island life has pros and cons.
Crypto Storage and Self-Custody
Becca asks: in order of preferred security levels, name your crypto storage places and devices. So, to me, it depends on how risky you want to get. As far as hardware wallets go, Trezor is my go-to for self-custody. I'm not a fan of Ledger. Trezor hasn't had any problems. But I do have both — I have Trezor and a Ledger — because I want to diversify. Then for other custody services, iTrustCapital is there if you want to use their custodial services.
Let me tell you right now — if you are not going to be able to pull your crypto out anytime soon, once it goes into iTrustCapital, be careful. I sold some Bitcoin and to get the cash out — you can sell it immediately, but the cash that's there, they're not releasing it quickly, and once you put your crypto in there, it ain't coming back out easily. It took me almost 10 days to get the cash out and the hoops I had to jump through were a real big pain. But I didn't lose anything. So there's that.
Without sellers, there isn't a market. Sell if you want, buy if you want. The more people that hodl, it's going to make the price go up. But sure.
Some people don't trust hardware wallets, and can you blame them? People have a short attention span. Just like Mt. Gox — I think it was around 2016, correct me in the comments — everybody lost a boatload of their Bitcoin and they're still trying to get it back, still doing distributions. With Mt. Gox, you would think that nobody would leave their crypto on exchanges. But new people came in. What did they do? Celsius — that sounds awesome. Voyager — that sounds good. FTX — that sounds really good. BlockFi — sure, why not? And then of course they lost it all. Short attention span. That took a good five years or so, but they still did it. When I got in in 2017, I heard about Mt. Gox, but no one was really harping on it. As far as hardware wallets, I think they'll probably make a comeback in the eyes of individuals who want to self-custody, but it's going to take a little bit of time.
Altcoins and Closing Thoughts
Kelby says it right: "I have left the altcoin space. It's just easier to buy Bitcoin and have more peace of mind." Same thing here. I have some altcoins, but I'm not actively buying anything. Although Cantor is interesting to me, but we'll see if that works out.
On Kaspa — I had a friend of mine, Joey, over in Puerto Rico who loved Kaspa. Boy, did it not do great as far as price appreciation. That's a lot of altcoins. If you want a proof-of-work for transactions, you have Kaspa. We'll see.
That's why I have these rules. The rules are important. When I made these rules was between when Celsius collapsed and the next couple of days, and when Voyager collapsed two weeks later. Celsius collapsed and I'm like, I want to make sure I never screw up like that again. Two weeks later, Voyager collapsed — that was June/July of 2022. And then of course FTX collapsed in October/November. We've been using these rules all the way through. And the last one is the most important: take profits. Nobody ever went broke taking profits.
As far as ETFs go, I know I'm going to have to go into them. I'm just dragging my feet. But I will be doing it, just like Plan B said and a bunch of other people said before. And I've got to tell you, I think a lot of maximalists are full of it. I bet you they do have cold storage, but I bet they also do ETFs and keep it on exchanges. Not every single one of them, but a bunch of them do.
Always take profits. Best advice ever.