The Bitcoin Infinity Show
The Data Behind the BIP-110 Fight | Renaud Cuny | BIS #208
- Renaud Cuny introduced the Bitcoin Portal, a network health scoring tool measuring Bitcoin's decentralization and security across mining, block space, nodes, and governance dimensions.
- The site quantifies spam on the blockchain: currently 45.5% of block space is non-financial data (ordinals, runes, OP_RETURNs), with direction of change more meaningful than absolute numbers.
- Mining centralization remains Bitcoin's primary weakness—top five pools control ~90% of hash rate; hardware manufacturing is even more concentrated (Bitmain and Microbt control 82% of ASIC sales).
- BIP-110 activation expected in August aims to allow nodes to reject blocks containing large OP_RETURNs (>80 bytes) without forking the chain; miner signaling remains minimal but adoption theory suggests early movers will trigger cascading compliance.
- Hash renting (via Ocean and Datum) enables individual node runners to become true miners rather than hashers, decentralizing block template creation and reducing mining pool gatekeeping.
- Node diversity is poor: 74% run Bitcoin Core, creating implementation risk despite near 100,000 total nodes; Bitcoin Knots and other implementations are encouraged for network health.