BIP-110 Bitcoin fork stalls with 0.15% hashpower as miners stay put

The BIP-110 Bitcoin fork drew just 0.15% of network hashpower, mining two blocks before stalling more than 80 blocks behind the main chain.

"Bitcoin worked exactly as designed. BIP-110 was free to fork, and the network was free not to follow," Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy, said on X. "The result was decisive: about 99.85% of Bitcoin's hash power stayed with Bitcoin."

The fork triggered Saturday at block 961,632, when nodes running BIP-110 software began rejecting blocks that failed to signal support for the proposal. About 2.53% of recent blocks signaled for the change, far below the 55% threshold needed to activate without splitting. At its current pace, the minority chain needs 2,015 more blocks for its first difficulty adjustment — roughly 25 years, Saylor estimated, against Bitcoin's standard two-week cycle.

The failed split shows how Bitcoin's proof-of-work system filters out unsupported changes, with hashpower distribution favoring the established chain. The mandatory signaling window closes at block 963,647, a mark the minority chain will not reach, and holders of fork coins face replay risk because identical transactions on both chains can be replayed on the main network.

BIP-110 proposed temporarily barring non-financial data such as Ordinal inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens from transactions, a practice backers said clogs the network and drives up fees. Miners showed little appetite for the change, since embedded data has generated significant fee revenue during periods of high Ordinals activity. The economic incentive to process all valid transactions outweighed ideological arguments about network purity.

Jameson Lopp, co-founder of Bitcoin security firm Casa, went further, saying he would not welcome back BIP-110 supporters who "proved themselves to be susceptible to delusional propaganda." The episode shows a long-running tension: Bitcoin's base layer is conservative by design, and any rule change faces an uphill battle without overwhelming consensus from miners and node operators.

The debate over block space usage is not going away. Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens continue to occupy block space, raising fees and occasionally pushing smaller transactions out of the mempool. Proposals to limit non-financial data will likely resurface in different forms, but the BIP-110 fork shows a hard-fork route is a dead end barring a complete shift in miner sentiment.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.