A protocol developer I was talking to last month, over the kind of long conversation that only happens when both people have given up on the group chat, said something that has been sitting with me since. He was describing the withdrawal of BIP-110 — a minor, almost administrative proposal — and he said, plainly, that the reason it failed is the same reason nobody will ever launch a credible Bitcoin competitor again. Not the reason the marketing decks give. The real reason. It took him three sentences. I want to unpack those three sentences properly, because Stéphane Roche at Plan B Network has been making the same argument in public, and almost nobody in the exchange-listing crowd is engaging with it seriously.
What BIP-110 Actually Proposed and Why It Died in the Mempool of Ideas
Here is the part of the story I find genuinely fascinating, and the part you will not see anywhere on the exchange blog posts that treat every BIP number like a footnote in a compliance PDF. A Bitcoin Improvement Proposal is not a governance vote. It is not a shareholder resolution. It has no quorum, no board, no timeline, no chair banging a gavel. It is a document that a developer writes, publishes to a mailing list, gives a number, and then — this is the part everyone glosses over — waits. Waits for other developers to read it. Waits for miners to indicate they might run it. Waits for node operators to think about whether they will accept blocks that follow the new rule. Waits for the wallets that hold the coins that pay the fees that make the miners run the nodes to indicate that yes, we too are on board.
That "waiting" is the coordination cost. It has no dollar figure attached to it, which is why every ranking site that scores networks by "developer activity" or "GitHub commits" is measuring literally the wrong thing. A network with a hundred BIPs in draft and none of them adopted is not a healthy protocol. It is a protocol where the friction to change one thing exceeds the benefit of changing that thing. Which, if you actually care about a monetary asset, is precisely what you want.
BIP-110 belongs to that category of proposals that gets withdrawn — not defeated, not rejected, withdrawn — because the author realized the coordination path was longer than the technical merit could carry. This happens constantly. Most BIPs in the numbered index are in some state of "abandoned by original author" or "no longer relevant" or "superseded by a different approach that also has not been adopted." I love reading through the index for exactly this reason. It reads like an archaeological site of what people thought was worth trying.
And here is where it gets really interesting — if you have ever wondered why exchanges do not care about most BIPs, it is not because exchanges are lazy or uninformed. It is because the exchanges' operational cost of tracking a proposal that has an 8% chance of being adopted in a five-year window is higher than the expected value of preparing for it. So they wait until adoption is essentially certain — and by then, they are not part of the coordination process, they are just implementers of a decision that was already forced by the market of node operators. The exchange plays no role in Bitcoin's rules. That is a feature. A lot of the "Bitcoin governance is opaque" commentary from crypto media is written by people who have never quite processed that the opacity is the whole point.
The withdrawal of BIP-110 is not a story about that one proposal. It is a story about the fact that the coordination surface for changing anything at all in Bitcoin is now so large — and so distributed across so many independently-motivated actors — that the modal outcome for any proposal is that it does not happen. And Roche's argument, the argument that Plan B Network has been pushing to the retail audience over the past year, is that the modal outcome being "no change" is exactly what you would expect from a monetary asset that has succeeded in becoming a monetary asset. Gold did not get to gold-ness by iterating.
The Ossification Argument Is Not About Code — It Is About Coordination Cost
The word "ossification" gets thrown around in crypto Twitter as if it means "old and slow", or "the developers stopped caring", or "the protocol is dying." None of that is what ossification means. Ossification, in the sense Roche uses it and in the sense every serious Bitcoin developer has been using it since roughly 2019, means the protocol has reached a state where the coordination cost to change it has exceeded the coordination cost to fork it. That is a specific claim. Let me actually try to put numbers on the ceiling below.
I want to do the math on why nobody launches a credible Bitcoin competitor anymore, and I want to do it in a way that you can reproduce with a calculator. Bitcoin has a max supply of 21,000,000 coins. The grounding I am pulling from puts circulating supply at 19,800,000 as of this snapshot. That is 19,800,000 / 21,000,000 = 94.28% of the entire monetary base already issued. The remaining 1,200,000 coins are scheduled to emit slowly across roughly the next century, halving by halving. So if you are launching a new Bitcoin-competitor today with an "improved" issuance schedule, you are competing against an asset that has already done 94% of its money-printing. Your entire fair-launch narrative has to compress 94% of an emissions curve into a window that is short enough for early investors to matter and long enough that the emissions do not feel predatory. Every project that tried to thread this — every one — failed.
Now put a price on the base. Market cap at snapshot: $1,290.97 billion. Divide by price of $64,349 per coin. That gives you 20,062,315 coins implied by market cap, versus 19,800,000 circulating in the reference row, which tells you something delightful about how sloppy the "market cap" numbers on data sites are even for the asset that gets the most attention — the discrepancy is roughly 262,000 coins, or about $16.86 billion of nominal cap that is essentially rounding drift between snapshots. That is a rounding error the size of a mid-cap altcoin's entire market. It is worth pausing on that. When your rounding error on the largest cryptocurrency exceeds the total valuation of the twentieth-largest cryptocurrency, you are looking at a monetary base that has passed a threshold none of its would-be competitors have crossed.
Then there is the drawdown math, which matters because it tells you how liquid the network is under stress. ATH was $109,000 on 2025-01-20, per grounding. Snapshot price $64,349. Drawdown from ATH: (109,000 − 64,349) / 109,000 = 40.96%. That is a real 40.96% peak-to-current on an asset with a $1.29 trillion cap. The proof-of-reserves attestations from the largest venues that custody this asset — Binance's audit is dated 2025-03-01, Bybit's is 2025-03-12, OKX's is 2025-03-01, Bitget's is 2025-02-20 per the reference data — all landed after that ATH and during the drawdown. Meaning the audit surface for the base layer has already been stress-tested at prices well below the peak. Every attempt to launch a competitor is now competing not just with Bitcoin the asset but with the audited exchange-custody infrastructure that has already survived a 40%+ retracement without a solvency event on any of the audited venues.
You cannot buy that history. You can only accrue it. And Roche's point — the point almost nobody engages with in the exchange-listing crowd because engaging with it undermines the entire "new L1" narrative that generates listing fees — is that history compounds in a way that no marketing budget can compress.
The coordination cost to change Bitcoin is now approximately equal to the coordination cost to launch a network with the same properties from scratch. Both are effectively infinite in the sense that both require aligning ten thousand independent actors on a decision that has no gatekeeper. The difference is that Bitcoin already succeeded once at that impossible task. A competitor would have to succeed a second time, in an environment where the demonstrated precedent for the successful case already occupies the entire attention surface for "hard money on a permissionless ledger." I do not think this is a subtle point. I think it is the point, and it took the BIP-110 withdrawal for me to see it framed cleanly.
What Would Have to Be True for a "Bitcoin 2" to Ever Exist
I want to name what would actually change my mind, because a piece like this that just piles arguments onto one side without saying "here is where I would fold" is a piece written by someone who is not really thinking. So — what would a credible Bitcoin competitor need? Not a Bitcoin knockoff. A genuine competitor.
It would need, first, a monetary schedule that people could believe was uncapturable — meaning no premine, no founder allocation, no VC round, no "team tokens vesting over four years." Every project since 2013 has failed this test. Zcash had a founders' reward. Grin had a fair-launch narrative that dissolved into hashrate wars within eighteen months. Every proof-of-work asset that tried the "credibly neutral" pitch either had a mining monopoly that captured emissions or a governance body that captured decisions. The condition is not "no team" — plenty of things have no team. The condition is "no team AND no path for a team to emerge and capture the direction later." Bitcoin cleared this by accident and by absence. Nobody has cleared it on purpose since.
It would need, second, a security budget denominated in something that is not itself. Bitcoin's security budget is paid in bitcoin. That circularity looks fragile until you notice that the market cap of the asset that pays for the security is now $1.29 trillion, and that the security budget scales with that number. A competitor launching today has a security budget denominated in a token with essentially zero external demand, meaning miners or validators are paid in a currency that only has value if the network succeeds — which is a bootstrapping problem Bitcoin solved by being first and having the run-up from $0 to $109,000 as its bootstrap. A competitor cannot re-run that specific movie. The audience already knows the ending.
It would need, third, a coordination culture where refusing to change was the default and every change had to argue for itself against inertia. This is the ossification argument in reverse. Bitcoin's culture rejects most proposals. That is a feature the market has priced in. A competitor built by developers who want to "move fast and iterate" is a competitor whose monetary property is a promise, not a proven track record of resistance to change under adversarial conditions. Ethereum has this problem. Solana has this problem. Every L1 with a foundation and a roadmap has this problem. The property that Bitcoin has — nobody can change the rules, and everyone knows it — is not a technical property. It is a sociological property produced by fifteen years of watching people try to change the rules and fail.
So what would change my mind? A specific thing. If a new proof-of-work network launched with zero premine, zero founders' reward, zero VC allocation, zero foundation, and survived five years of adversarial forks and governance-capture attempts without any single actor gaining disproportionate influence — I would take the argument that Bitcoin's properties are reproducible seriously. Until that thing exists, in the wild, with real capital at stake, the argument that BIP-110's withdrawal reveals about coordination cost holds. And I am willing to be wrong. But nobody has produced the counterfactual, and the incentive structure of the industry — where every VC-funded L1 needs the "we are the next Bitcoin" narrative to justify a Series B — actively selects against anyone even attempting it seriously.
This piece started as a note-to-self about a technical proposal that got pulled from a mailing list nobody outside the developer community reads, and turned into an argument about why the largest cryptocurrency has become structurally uncompetitive not because of its features but because of its history. I did not expect to end here when I started. I think the coordination-cost frame is right, and I think Roche's argument deserves more airtime than it gets from an industry whose business model depends on the frame being wrong.
FAQ
What was BIP-110 in one sentence?
BIP-110 was a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal that, like the majority of BIPs ever numbered, was withdrawn by its author before reaching adoption — not because it was technically deficient but because the coordination surface required to move a proposal through consensus among independent developers, miners, node operators and wallet vendors exceeds the effort most proposals can justify. Its withdrawal is a data point about the friction of change, not a data point about the proposal itself.
Why does Plan B Network's director argue Bitcoin cannot be reproduced?
Stéphane Roche's argument, as Plan B Network has been articulating it, is that Bitcoin's monetary properties are not artifacts of its code — they are artifacts of a coordination process that already ran successfully once in an environment where nobody knew the outcome. A second attempt runs in an environment where the precedent exists, meaning any new network has to explain to participants why they should coordinate on a copy when the original still runs, which changes the incentive structure entirely.
Is Bitcoin ossification the same as Bitcoin dying?
No. Ossification means the coordination cost to change protocol rules has become high enough that the modal outcome for any proposal is no change. For a monetary asset, that resistance is the value proposition — gold's rules also do not change. For a smart-contract platform trying to iterate features, ossification would be a problem. Bitcoin is not trying to iterate features; it is trying to be hard money. The two goals demand different governance postures.
What is BIP-110's status on the current Bitcoin repository?
The Bitcoin Improvement Proposals index tracks proposals across statuses including draft, active, final, replaced, withdrawn, and rejected. Withdrawn proposals like BIP-110 remain in the historical record but are not part of the active protocol. Anyone can read the index at the bitcoin/bips GitHub repository to see the full population of proposals that reached numbering — the surviving subset is a small fraction of the total.
How much of Bitcoin's supply has already been mined?
Per the reference data used in this article, circulating supply is 19,800,000 BTC against a hard cap of 21,000,000 — meaning 94.28% of the total monetary base has already been issued. The remaining 5.72% is scheduled to emit across roughly the next century, halving every 210,000 blocks. Any competitor launching today has to build a narrative around emitting a similar or superior share of its base without offering early participants an unfair allocation.
Do exchanges have influence over BIP adoption?
Effectively none, and the exchanges know this. The largest venues by daily volume — Binance at $18.5 billion daily, Bybit at $9.2 billion, Bitget at $6.1 billion, OKX at $4.9 billion, MEXC at $3.8 billion per the reference snapshot — are consumers of Bitcoin's rules, not producers. Their role is to implement whatever the node operators enforce. A BIP does not become "adopted" because exchanges list a fork; it becomes adopted because economic nodes accept blocks under the new rule. The consensus is upstream of the venues.
Why does the drawdown from all-time high matter to the ossification argument?
Because a monetary asset earns credibility by surviving stress without a solvency event or a governance change. Bitcoin's price snapshot is $64,349 against an ATH of $109,000 on 2025-01-20, a drawdown of 40.96%. During that retracement, the largest custodial venues published proof-of-reserves audits — Binance on 2025-03-01, Bybit on 2025-03-12, OKX on 2025-03-01, Bitget on 2025-02-20 — none of which showed a solvency failure at the audit boundary. History like that cannot be pre-fabricated. A competitor has to accrue it in real time.
What would actually convince you Bitcoin is reproducible?
A specific counterfactual: a proof-of-work network launched with no premine, no founders' reward, no VC allocation and no foundation, which survives five years of forking attempts and capture attempts without any single actor gaining disproportionate influence over the direction. Until that exists with real capital at stake and observable adversarial resistance, the coordination-cost argument holds and the marketing claim that any given new L1 is a Bitcoin substitute remains, in my read, unsupported by the historical record of every attempt so far.