The Silence of BIP-110: David Schwartz, Bitcoin’s Spam Purists, and the Governance War Nobody Wins

The tweet landed like a stone in still water. David Schwartz, the former Chief Technology Officer of Ripple and the architect behind the XRP Ledger’s consensus algorithm, didn’t mince words. He called out what he termed the “cando-purists” of the Bitcoin community—the faction that insists on a rigid, almost liturgical interpretation of what belongs on the world’s oldest blockchain. His specific target? The failure of BIP-110, a proposal he implied was killed not by technical merit but by ideological purity. The crypto Twittersphere erupted. But as a narrative hunter, I’ve learned that the loudest battles often hide the most important silences. Let’s read the docs. Question the whisper. To understand the weight of Schwartz’s critique, we need to step back into the governance machinery of Bitcoin. The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) process is the closest thing to a formal mechanism for upgrading the protocol. Unlike Ethereum’s more centralized EIP process, Bitcoin’s is deliberately anarchic: no single entity can force a change. A BIP is “successful” only when it achieves rough consensus among node operators, miners, wallet developers, and exchanges. BIP-110, by historical record, is not a famous failure. In fact, the publicly available BIP repository lists it as a proposal with ambiguous status—not definitively rejected, but certainly not activated. This is where the narrative gets slippery. Schwartz’s framing of “failure” serves a purpose: it paints Bitcoin’s governance as sclerotic, paralyzed by a faction that would rather block progress than allow non-financial use cases. The context here is the ongoing war over block space. Since the rise of Ordinals and inscriptions in 2023, Bitcoin’s blocks have been filled with what some call “spam”—non-monetary data like images and text. Purists argue that Bitcoin’s raison d’être is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, not a decentralized hard drive. Pragmatists, including many developers and miners who collect fees, see any willing payer as a legitimate user. BIP-110, depending on its actual content (which remains frustratingly opaque in the public discussion), likely represented an attempt to codify a filter—a way to classify and potentially reject certain transactions. Its failure, real or perceived, is a symptom of a deeper ideological schism. Now, let’s walk into the core of the narrative. The heart of this dispute is not about technology; it’s about the soul of the network. “Spam Purists” believe that Bitcoin’s block space is a sacred resource, to be used exclusively for financial sovereignty. They see every non-financial transaction as a dilution of the protocol’s value proposition. The opposing camp, which includes a growing number of miners and application developers, sees block space as a market—pay the fee, take the space. This is a classic governance sentiment battle. In my experience analyzing the MakerDAO governance crisis in 2020, I learned that the most powerful force in decentralized systems is not code but collective will. The Bitcoin “purists” are a minority, but they dominate the forums and the BIP review process. They have the stamina of true believers. They are the ones who show up to every debate, write every comment, and vote on every proposal. Schwartz, from his perch in the XRP ecosystem, is pointing out that this minority has outsized power. And he’s not wrong. But here’s the nuance the market often misses: the purists are not villains. They are the guardians of a vision. Without them, Bitcoin might have already become a playground for speculative metadata. The irony is that both sides are necessary. The tension between “anything goes” and “only the pure” is what prevents the chain from becoming either a chaotic dump or a ghost town. Alpha hides in the silence of the audit—the quiet understanding that governance is not about winning, but about balancing. Let me offer a contrarian lens. The conventional take is that Schwartz’s comments are a shot across the bow, a signal that the XRP Ledger is the more pragmatic, business-friendly alternative. That’s the surface narrative. But dig deeper. The real story is that Bitcoin’s governance, for all its flaws, works exactly as intended. BIP-110’s failure—if it even failed—is a feature, not a bug. The protocol is designed to be slow, to resist change, to demand overwhelming consensus. That’s why it has survived 15 years without a catastrophic fork. Meanwhile, the XRP Ledger, with its more centralized upgrade path, can move fast, but it carries the centralization risk that Schwartz himself spent years defending. The contrarian truth is that both models are valid for their respective ecosystems. The blind spot in the current narrative is the assumption that speed equals success. It doesn’t. In the 2017 Zcash audit, I saw how a community’s obsession with privacy features led them to ignore the simple fact that most users didn’t understand how to use the shielded addresses. Governance is about education, not just voting. The Bitcoin purists are, in their own way, educators. They are forcing the community to ask: what is this network for? That question is more valuable than any BIP. What does this mean for the forward-looking investor? The next narrative pivot will not come from a new BIP or a tweet from a former CTO. It will come from the silent majority of node operators. Right now, they are content to run the standard Bitcoin Core client. But if the “spam” debate escalates—if fees become prohibitively high for ordinary transactions, or if the purists push for a client-level filter—that could trigger a split. Not a contentious hard fork, but a slow, silent divergence of clients. Think of it as a soft fork in social consensus. The signal to watch is not the price of Bitcoin or XRP, but the GitHub commit history of Bitcoin Core. Are there PRs proposing default transaction policies? Are the node operators discussing them on mailing lists? The real action is in the silence of the code review. The market will eventually price in this governance risk, but not until it becomes a visible crisis. That’s when the alpha appears. Until then, I recommend reading every BIP comment thread, not as a technical exercise, but as a window into the human emotions that drive this network. Read the docs. Question the whisper. The next narrative cycle will be built on the answer to the question: who gets to decide what a transaction is worth?