Bitcoin Dev Martin Habovštiak Pushes Network to Its Absolute Limits—What It Means for BIP-110’s Future

Bitcoin's protocol isn't just theory—it's a battleground. Developer Martin Habovštiak is stress-testing the network's core assumptions, targeting the ambitious claims of BIP-110 in a live-fire exercise.

The Stress Test Protocol

Forget hypotheticals. Habovštiak is running real-world transactions designed to probe the upper boundaries of throughput and validation. The goal? To see if the network can handle the load that future scaling proposals like BIP-110 promise. It's a brute-force audit of Bitcoin's foundational code.

Implications for Scaling Roadmaps

This isn't academic. The results directly challenge—or validate—the roadmap for Bitcoin's evolution. If the network stumbles under Habovštiak's crafted load, it forces a hard rethink of how we achieve mass adoption. If it holds, it provides the ironclad data needed to push forward. Every block tells a story of resilience or a need for recalibration.

The Verdict from the Trenches

Live testing cuts through marketing hype. It separates architectural elegance from operational reality. While financiers place bets on future price charts, developers like Habovštiak are in the engine room, checking for leaks under pressure. The network's response will either be a quiet triumph of engineering or a loud alarm bell—no amount of venture capital can fix a fundamental protocol flaw. Ultimately, code doesn't lie, even if the latest whitepaper tries to.

The Slovak developer did not include OP_RETURN opcodes and OP_IF instructions

Habovštiak asserted on X: “I made a contiguous image file that can be misinterpreted by the BIP-110 bitcoin fork as an entire transaction and contiguously stored in the BIP-110-compliant chain!” 

In another post, he defended the timing of the image and explained why he didn’t do this when BIP-110 first surfaced, arguing that validating the proof on mainnet is far more difficult — and more compelling — than an earlier demonstration would have been.

So far, much of the online community is mostly impressed that the BTC developer’s transaction did not use OP_RETURN opcodes, skipped Taproot in favor of SegWit v0, and included no OP_IF statements. Ideally, BIP-110 primarily focuses on restricting these elements, and thus Habovštiak claims his approach proves the limitations can be bypassed.

However, a user on X challenged the claim, saying the transaction isn’t contiguous in the way that actually counts at the protocol level. Habovštiak later responded, saying the critic was using a selective definition of the term.

Habovštiak claims BIP restriction would only increase the amount of data stored on the blockchain

Habovštiak’s transaction comes at a time when there’s still tension between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots over which types of data should be allowed in Bitcoin. 

BIP-110 was first presented as BIP-444 in October 2025 and outlined a one-year soft fork that would enforce an 83-byte cap on OP_RETURN, restrict individual data pushes to 256 bytes, and limit other large-data scripting capabilities.  

Most proponents of the proposal believe arbitrary data will create liability issues for node operators and distract from Bitcoin’s monetary purpose. Since 2023, Luke Dashjr — CTO of the Ocean mining pool and developer of Bitcoin Knots — has been calling arbitrary Bitcoin inscriptions spam and is now advocating for the BIP-110. In response to the Slovak’s latest transaction, he further contended that it was not truly “contiguous.” 

Nonetheless, Habovštiak claimed he created another version of the transaction that adhered to the constraints of BIP-110, but it was significantly larger than the original. He thus contends that the plan would only paradoxically augment the total data stored on BTC’s blockchain.

He also noted this experiment was meant to be a one-time proof-of-concept, and he deliberately kept the code private to avoid encouraging NFT-style usage. He’s now framed himself as an opponent of blockchain spam and is motivated by what he views as inaccuracies from the Knots camp. 

He commented, “There’s something I hate much more than spam: Untruths. I tried arguing about this in the past, showed a contiguous image encoded to fit into the witness, and yet, the Knots supporters are still saying the same stuff over and over.”

So far, data from The Bitcoin Portal shows that 8.8% of nodes currently back BIP-110. The Bitcoin Knots node count has also seen a significant uptick; it is now 10 times what it was at the beginning of last year.

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