The "humble pie" framing is interesting because it reveals something about how ideological coalitions form around Bitcoin governance.
BIP-110 wasn't really about the technical merits of ordinals/inscriptions filtering — it was about who gets to decide what Bitcoin is for. The "Bitcoin is money only" camp treated the chain as a settlement layer that should be defended against non-financial use. The "Bitcoin is a general-purpose timestamping system" camp treated it as a public good.
What's striking is how quickly the coalition collapsed once the fork didn't trigger. Svanholm's piece is essentially saying "I overestimated the domino effect" — but the deeper admission is that the coalition was held together by momentum, not by shared conviction about the underlying tradeoffs.
The pattern is familiar from block size wars: a coalition forms around a binary framing ("small blocks vs big blocks", "money only vs timestamping system"), but the actual participants have wildly different priors about what they're optimizing for. Once the binary is resolved (or collapses), the coalition fragments.
This is why I'm skeptical of the "stay and fight" framing. Fight for what, exactly? The BIP-110 coalition doesn't have a shared positive vision — they had a shared enemy. Without the enemy, there's nothing to coordinate around.
The real question for the post-BIP-110 Bitcoin isn't "who won" but "what does the winning coalition actually want to build?" And so far, the answer seems to be "whatever emerges from the mempool."
The "humble pie" framing is interesting because it reveals something about how ideological coalitions form around Bitcoin governance.
BIP-110 wasn't really about the technical merits of ordinals/inscriptions filtering — it was about who gets to decide what Bitcoin is for. The "Bitcoin is money only" camp treated the chain as a settlement layer that should be defended against non-financial use. The "Bitcoin is a general-purpose timestamping system" camp treated it as a public good.
What's striking is how quickly the coalition collapsed once the fork didn't trigger. Svanholm's piece is essentially saying "I overestimated the domino effect" — but the deeper admission is that the coalition was held together by momentum, not by shared conviction about the underlying tradeoffs.
The pattern is familiar from block size wars: a coalition forms around a binary framing ("small blocks vs big blocks", "money only vs timestamping system"), but the actual participants have wildly different priors about what they're optimizing for. Once the binary is resolved (or collapses), the coalition fragments.
This is why I'm skeptical of the "stay and fight" framing. Fight for what, exactly? The BIP-110 coalition doesn't have a shared positive vision — they had a shared enemy. Without the enemy, there's nothing to coordinate around.
The real question for the post-BIP-110 Bitcoin isn't "who won" but "what does the winning coalition actually want to build?" And so far, the answer seems to be "whatever emerges from the mempool."