BIP-110 Bitcoin Fork Stalls After Just Two Blocks

A long-running dispute over how Bitcoin should handle non-financial data has now resulted in an actual chain split, but the breakaway network has struggled to gain any traction.

The BIP-110 fork emerged Saturday at Bitcoin block 961,632. Nodes running software that supported the proposal began rejecting blocks that did not signal for BIP-110. The main Bitcoin network, however, continued accepting those blocks as normal.

AntPool mined a block that did not support the proposal and remained on the main chain. A miner using Ocean followed the alternative rules, creating the competing branch.

The result was a sharply divided network, but not an evenly matched one.

Bitcoin continued producing blocks at its usual pace of roughly one every 10 minutes. The BIP-110 chain managed to produce only two blocks over approximately eight hours before effectively stopping. By early Sunday, it had fallen more than 80 blocks behind Bitcoin.

The biggest obstacle is mining difficulty.

Bitcoin adjusts its mining difficulty only after every 2,016 blocks. Because the minority chain inherited Bitcoin's existing difficulty while controlling only a tiny fraction of the network's computing power, it has little ability to produce blocks at a normal rate.

Only around 2.53% of recently mined blocks had signaled support for BIP-110, well below the roughly 55% threshold required for activation without a contentious split.

At its current hash rate, the alternative chain could take roughly 350 days to reach its next difficulty adjustment. Bitcoin's main chain, by comparison, is expected to complete the same period in about two weeks.

That leaves the fork facing extremely long gaps between blocks unless its mining support changes dramatically.

BIP-110 seeks to temporarily restrict certain ways of inserting arbitrary data, including images and text, into Bitcoin transactions. Supporters argue that practices associated with Ordinals inscriptions have increased blockchain congestion and fees while moving Bitcoin away from its primary use as a monetary network.

Critics see the issue differently.

They argue that users who pay for Bitcoin block space should be able to use that space as they choose, provided their transactions follow the existing consensus rules. From that perspective, changing the rules to exclude specific types of transactions risks weakening Bitcoin's censorship resistance.

The disagreement has divided developers, miners, businesses and Bitcoin users, with the debate extending beyond technical questions into broader arguments about who should have the authority to determine Bitcoin's future rules.

Strategy executive Michael Saylor, one of the proposal's prominent critics, argued that the split demonstrated the resilience of Bitcoin's consensus model.

"Bitcoin worked exactly as designed," Saylor wrote on X, pointing to the overwhelming majority of hash power remaining on the original chain. He estimated that approximately 99.85% of Bitcoin's mining power stayed with the main network while the BIP-110 branch produced only two blocks.

Bitcoin advocate Jameson Lopp also criticized supporters of the fork, saying he would not welcome back or unblock people who backed the alternative chain. His comments highlighted how sharply the technical disagreement has spilled into the wider Bitcoin community.

There is also a practical risk for anyone using or holding assets on the minority chain.

Because the fork shares transaction history with Bitcoin and the two networks can accept the same transactions, transactions conducted on one chain could potentially be replayed on the other. A transaction intended to sell coins on the BIP-110 chain could therefore create exposure to the corresponding Bitcoin transaction under certain circumstances.

The fork's mandatory signaling period is scheduled to end at block 963,647. Given its current pace, the minority chain appears unlikely to approach that milestone anytime soon.

For now, the split has produced a clear result: BIP-110 supporters have their own chain, but almost all of Bitcoin's mining power and economic activity remain on the original network.