Whether bitcoin The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-110 started as a proposal to limit non-financial data such as Ordinals inscriptions, seen by some as spam, to free up blockchain space.
The proposal was debated in an open forum by the developer community, failed to secure broad support and was effectively denied by distributed consensus
The key here is distributed consensus: No regulator or central committee banned it. The free-market story continues, though. Supporters also got to exercise their right to form their own blockchain, forked or split from the original Bitcoin.
They did so at block 961,632 in an attempt to implement their preferred rules in the newer version in a voluntary move not forced by any regulator or middlemen. Miners quickly chose the more profitable version, the original Bitcoin. The new chain, which inherited Bitcoin’s massive mining difficulty, attracted only a tiny fraction of hashpower and produced just two blocks before grinding to a halt.