BACK — 'THE NETWORK IS NOT FIRING ITS MINERS.' BIP-110 SIGNALING EXPIRES NATURALLY.

Adam Back stepped into the widening BIP-110 panic narrative this weekend and did what a Technologist voice with standing on the protocol is supposed to do: he made the mechanism legible. His pushback on the 'Bitcoin will fire its miners on August 7' framing is direct. The network is not preparing to change its mining rules. The BIP-110 signaling process is designed to expire naturally without majority hashrate approval. There is no automatic threat to the blockchain. This is a governance fight around a proposed data-limit rule; it is not a mining shutdown.

The mechanism matters because the panic framing does not survive the mechanism. Mandatory signaling begins around block 961,632 (currently projected near Aug 9). Lock-in requires 55% of blocks over a two-week window to carry the signal — roughly 1,109 out of every 2,016 blocks. Foundry USA is running a hashrate-weighted vote of its miner customers; the vote closes early August and default-no is the pool position without majority pool-customer support. Current miner signaling has been running well under 5%. The proposal will simply not activate on the current trajectory.

The Technologist read across the four-character framework is clean here. The protocol is doing what it was designed to do: allow miner-signaled soft-fork consideration, and then let insufficient support kill the proposal without a formal reject. Back's public correction is the operator-class doing the same thing at the discourse layer — naming the mechanism when a load-bearing narrative starts drifting away from it. The chain runs. The signaling window runs. The proposal expires or it doesn't. Everything else is theater.