We don’t compromise on the fundamentals. That lesson, learned over 150 hours tracing the reentrancy vulnerability in The DAO’s contract back in 2017, echoes louder today as I watch Michael Saylor fire a shot across the bow of a proposed Bitcoin improvement proposal. He called it a 'nationalist impulse' to inject 'monetary purity' through legal force—a statement that landed like a block on a fragile chessboard. But this isn’t just a billionaire versus a proposal. It’s a mirror held up to Bitcoin’s deepest conflict: can the world’s most resilient store of value also bend to the rules of nation-states?
Last week, Saylor—the Strategy CEO whose company holds over 200,000 Bitcoin—publicly opposed BIP 110, a proposal that, from the scant details available, appears to introduce transaction filtering or identity verification at the protocol level. He framed it as an assault on Bitcoin’s core: code that enables freedom, property rights, and permissionless exchange. The bear market didn’t crush my portfolio alone; it taught me to recognize when the real battle shifts from price to philosophy. And this battle, fought in GitHub issues and Twitter threads, is precisely where Bitcoin’s future will be forged.
Context: The Decentralization Philosophy Under Siege
Bitcoin’s governance is a beautiful mess. There’s no CEO, no board, no formal vote. Instead, thousands of node operators, miners, and developers engage in a chaotic grassroots consensus. BIP 110, whatever its technical details, challenges the fragile equilibrium by proposing a mandatory rule change—likely requiring transactions to include proof of identity or to avoid addresses flagged by sanctions. To Saylor, this is akin to rewriting the Constitution for temporary political gain.
I remember the 2020 DeFi Summer, when I forked Curve’s stableswap invariant locally to understand impermanent loss. Back then, the narrative was clear: code is law, and law is immutable. But now, the same people who championed that ethos are being asked to voluntarily shackle Bitcoin to the whims of regulators. Saylor’s opposition isn’t just about preserving 'digital gold'; it’s about affirming that Bitcoin’s value lies in its rejection of any sovereign’s right to dictate monetary rules. That principle, as I argued in my first meetup in Nairobi in 2018, is what separates Bitcoin from every state-issued currency.
Core: The Poetry and Pain of Immutability
Let’s tear into the technical heart of this debate. Based on Saylor’s rhetoric, BIP 110 likely introduces a mechanism to blacklist or quarantine coins that have interacted with certain entities—a direct attack on fungibility. For a digital commodity to serve as money, each unit must be perfectly interchangeable. If your coin can be 'tainted' by its transaction history, Bitcoin loses its most critical property: trustless exchange.
I’ve seen this movie before. During the 2022 crash, I spent months researching ZK-rollup scalability solutions for a series of viral threads. In that deep dive, I learned that even the most elegant cryptographic proof can be undone by a flawed social layer. BIP 110 doesn’t break any mathematical formulas; it breaks the social contract that no central authority can revoke your access to the network.
The economics here are equally stark. Bitcoin’s security model depends on miners being rewarded in a predictable, permissionless way. Introduce identity filters, and you create a two-tier system: 'clean' coins that flow freely, and 'dirty' ones subject to censorship. The result? A fragmented liquidity pool, higher spreads, and a digital currency that begins to resemble a traditional fiat system—complete with capital controls.
From my perspective as a protocol PM in Nairobi, this feels like watching a reentrancy attack on Bitcoin’s soul. The vulnerability isn’t in the code; it’s in the governance process that allows external pressures to warp the protocol’s intent. The 2017 DAO hack taught me that smart contracts are only as strong as the social consensus behind them. BIP 110 is a smarter, stealthier attack—one that uses the very mechanism of improvement to hollow out the foundation.
Contrarian: The Pragmatist’s Temptation
Of course, there’s always a counterpoint, and it’s one I’ve wrestled with personally. During my time building an on-ramp for institutional clients in 2024, I saw firsthand the demand for regulatory clarity. Banks and asset managers won’t touch Bitcoin if it remains a wild west. Some argue that a compliant version of Bitcoin—one that satisfies FATF’s Travel Rule or OFAC sanctions—could unlock trillions in institutional capital.
But here’s the flaw in that logic: adoption gained by sacrificing principle is not true adoption; it’s a temporary reprieve. The bear market didn’t teach me to capitulate; it taught me that resilience comes from staying true to what makes Bitcoin unique. If we allow the protocol to be modified for compliance, we set a precedent that any external power can force changes. Next, it could be transaction limits for privacy, then mandatory KYC for all users. The slippery slope is real, and I’ve seen enough projects pivot from 'decentralized' to 'centralized with a blockchain wrapper' to know that once you start compromising, you never stop.
A personal story: In 2025, when I launched TruthLayer—a decentralized registry for AI-generated media—I faced intense pressure to include a moderation layer that could remove harmful content. I refused, because that would have destroyed the trustlessness of the system. Users didn’t want a nanny; they wanted authenticity. Similarly, Bitcoin users don’t want a state-sanctioned ledger; they want an immutable, permissionless store of value. The pragmatist’s temptation is to assume that bending the rules makes you stronger, but in crypto, flexibility is often the enemy of resilience.
Takeaway: Vision Forward — The Fork That Never Happens
So where does this leave us? BIP 110 is unlikely to pass in its current form; Saylor’s opposition represents a formidable coalition of maximalists. But the question it poses will remain: can Bitcoin remain a global, apolitical monetary network while nation-states demand compliance?
The bear market didn’t kill Bitcoin; it revealed its anchor. About me: I started this journey in 2017, chasing a reentrancy bug in The DAO because I believed that code should be a social contract, not just a tool. Since then, I’ve weathered crashes, built bridges to institutions, and learned that the most important battles are fought in the mind—not on the chain.
As I return to my Nairobi apartment, reading the latest on BIP 110, I know one thing: we don’t need to change the code to win; we need to defend the principles that make the code worth running. The proposal may die or live, but the idea it represents—that Bitcoin can be tamed—must be defeated every time it surfaces. That’s not nostalgia; it’s the only way to ensure that the freedom I discovered in 2017 remains available to the next curious 20-year-old in a remote corner of the world.