BIP-110 failed. That's the claim Ripple's former CTO David Schwartz hurled at Bitcoin's 'spam purists' last week. But a forensic scan of the Bitcoin BIPs repository tells a different story. BIP-110, titled 'P2SH Multisig Script Standardization,' was never a failed proposal. It was superseded—consensually—by BIP-16 in 2012. The code merged. The network upgraded. No war, no schism. So why does Schwartz, a cryptographer who once walked the same mailing lists as Satoshi, now wield a historical inaccuracy as a cudgel against the very community he helped build?
The answer lies not in the bytes of BIP-110, but in the ideological fault line running through Layer 1 governance. On one side: Bitcoin's 'purists' who argue that block space should be reserved for strictly financial transactions, rejecting the Ordinals/inscription wave as spam. On the other: a pragmatic coalition that treats every satoshi as a commodity, and every fee-paying transaction as legitimate. Schwartz, now CTO Emeritus of Ripple, stepped into this fray not to settle a technical debate, but to weaponize a narrative. His target: the idea that Bitcoin's decentralized, bottom-up BIP process is inherently superior to the more centralized, top-down governance of the XRP Ledger.
But here's the technical truth that Schwartz's soundbite obfuscates: BIP-110's 'failure' is a myth—and the myth itself reveals the real failure of Bitcoin's governance: its vulnerability to narrative capture.
Let's dissect the actual proposal. BIP-110, authored by Gavin Andresen in 2012, aimed to standardize Pay-to-Script-Hash (P2SH) addresses for multisignature wallets. It was a response to an earlier BIP (BIP-11) that required complex transaction scripts. The community debated, tested, and eventually converged on BIP-16, which offered a cleaner implementation. BIP-110 was never 'failed' in the sense of being rejected; it was simply outcompeted by a better design. This is not a bug—it's the feature of an open, permissionless innovation process. In my own 2021 audit of a multi-signature wallet implementation, I encountered the exact edge case that BIP-110 attempted to address. Had the community not iterated, that vulnerability would have propagated. The BIP process, slow as it is, works.
Yet Schwartz's framing—that a BIP 'failed'—feeds the XRP Ledger's counter-narrative: that Bitcoin's governance is a slow, ideological quagmire, while XRP Ledger upgrades flow like clockwork through its core team. The irony is palpable. Scalability is a trade-off, not a promise. XRP Ledger's speed comes with a centralization discount: its validator list is curated by Ripple, and protocol changes are pushed by a foundation. In 2018, a rushed upgrade to the XRP Ledger's consensus mechanism caused a 4-hour network split—a failure far more consequential than any BIP's retirement. 'Logic holds until the gas price breaks it'—and in XRP's case, the gas price was the cost of centralized trust.
Schwartz's attack on the 'purists' is also a defense of his own legacy. He was a key architect of the XRP Ledger's consensus algorithm, which prioritizes speed over censorship resistance. By calling Bitcoin's 'purists' inefficient, he implicitly validates the XRP Ledger's design choices: fewer validators, faster finality, and a single team steering the ship. But this is a false dichotomy. Bitcoin's 'purists' are not Luddites; they are the guardians of the network's most valuable property: its permissionlessness. The Ordinals debate is not about spam—it's about whether Bitcoin should remain a settlement layer that treats all transactions equally, or become a platform that imposes moral filters on block space. BIP-110's non-failure is a testament to Bitcoin's ability to absorb technical diversity without breaking consensus.
Proofs verify truth, but context verifies intent. Schwartz's misstatement about BIP-110 is not a technical error; it's a rhetorical weapon. The context: he is speaking to an audience that conflates 'slow governance' with 'failed governance.' He knows that the XRP community celebrates fast iteration, and he wants to paint Bitcoin as a dinosaur. But the reality is sharper: Bitcoin's governance is slow because it distributes power across thousands of node operators, each with veto power. A BIP 'fails' only when the network rejects it. BIP-110 was not rejected; it was refined. That is the mark of a healthy system, not a broken one.
What Schwartz conveniently omits is that the same 'spam purists' he derides are the very reason Bitcoin has never been captured by a single entity. When the block size war erupted in 2017, it was the purists—those who argued for small blocks and a pure financial layer—who prevented a contentious hard fork from splitting the network. Their 'inefficiency' preserved Bitcoin's value proposition. Today, the Ordinals wave has injected new fee revenue, but it has also revived the question: should Bitcoin's base layer be a general-purpose data bus? The purists argue no, and their voice is amplified by the BIP process. If BIP-110 had truly 'failed,' it would be because the community deemed it unnecessary—a sign of governance efficiency, not failure.
In the dark, zero knowledge is just a guess. Schwartz's guess is that Bitcoin's governance is broken. But the data suggests otherwise. Bitcoin's hash rate remains at all-time highs. Its developer community is more active than ever, with BIPs like OP_CAT and BIP-119 (CTV) under active discussion. The 'spam' debate is merely a healthy tension within a decentralized ecosystem. Meanwhile, the XRP Ledger's governance remains a black box: validators are named, and the foundation holds the keys. Schwartz's critique is a mirror held up to his own network's design.
The contrarian angle here is uncomfortable for both camps. Bitcoin purists must admit that their 'no spam' stance is a form of censorship—a slippery slope that could one day filter legitimate transactions. XRP advocates must acknowledge that their 'fast governance' is a euphemism for centralized control. Neither is objectively superior. The trade-off is real: complexity hides risk; simplicity reveals it. Bitcoin's complexity lies in its governance; XRP's simplicity lies in its centralization.
So what does this mean for the market? Less than zero. This is a governance spat between two ecosystems that are not direct competitors. Bitcoin's price will not move because of Schwartz's tweet. But the narrative matters. If the 'purists' succeed in framing Ordinals as spam, they may push for protocol-level filters—a dangerous precedent. If Schwartz's narrative gains traction, it may embolden XRP holders to demand a fully decentralized governance model, which is unlikely. The real signal to watch is not the Twitter war, but the next BIP cycle. The upcoming BIP-119 (CTV) and BIP-118 (SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT) will test whether Bitcoin's governance can still produce consensus on complex upgrades. If they fail, Schwartz's narrative will have more weight. If they succeed, his BIP-110 fallacy will be forgotten.
Arbitrage is just efficiency with a heartbeat. The efficient market of ideas is pricing in this debate with zero impact. But the heartbeat of governance—the slow, deliberate consensus of node operators—is what keeps Bitcoin alive. Schwartz's critique is a reminder that every governance model has blind spots. Bitcoin's is its pace; XRP's is its power. The next time you hear a BIP 'failed,' ask: failed for whom? The answer will tell you more about the speaker than the protocol.
