Bitcoin's BIP-110 fork stalls at two blocks as 99.85% hashpower stays

Bitcoin's BIP-110 fork split at block 961,632 on Aug. 8, mined two blocks, then froze as 99.85 percent of hashpower stayed on the original 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, calling the result "decisive."

Only 51 of the 2,016 blocks in the prior difficulty period backed the proposal, or 2.53 percent, far below the 55 percent threshold the soft fork set for activation. The minority branch inherited Bitcoin's full difficulty of 127.48 trillion but commanded roughly 0.15 percent of hashpower, leaving its next difficulty adjustment an estimated 350 days away. By 15:27 UTC Sunday the main chain had advanced to block 961,744, a gap of 111 blocks, with zero of the first 113 blocks in the new period supporting the fork.

The failure is the most decisive governance rejection since SegWit2x was called off in 2017, and it raises the bar for future soft forks such as OP_CTV. BIP-110 backers, including mining group Roughnecks, have floated switching the proof-of-work algorithm to bypass the miners who rejected them — a move that would create a functionally separate cryptocurrency.

What BIP-110 proposed

The Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, authored by pseudonymous developer Dathon Ohm, would have capped most new output scripts at 34 bytes, OP_RETURN at 83 bytes, and data pushes at 256 bytes for 52,416 blocks, roughly one year. The target was Ordinals inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, and Runes, which supporters including Bitcoin Knots maintainer Luke Dashjr called spam that bloats the chain and drives up fees. The proposal shipped without replay protection, meaning a transaction valid on one chain could be replayed on the other — a risk Bitcoin Cash avoided when it forked in 2017.

Saylor published a 110-point essay opposing the proposal, arguing that rejecting valid, fee-paying transactions sets a precedent that could be used to censor any class of Bitcoin activity. Blockstream co-founder Adam Back joined him, warning that enforcing disputed rules without broad support was the greater threat to Bitcoin's integrity. The economic case against the fork was equally clear: Ordinals and Runes transactions pay fees, and during peak inscription periods those fees have pushed average transaction costs above $20.

The proof-of-work pivot

The most striking development came after the fork failed. Roughnecks, the pseudonymous mining group that produced both BIP-110 blocks using OCEAN's DATUM protocol, announced it would resume mining the stalled chain and continue until a "sensible proof of work change" could replace the mining pools that refused to follow. Developer Chris Guida has rebased experimental code containing 12 commits across 19 files for selecting a different proof-of-work algorithm, though he described it as "just some code to have in our back pocket."

Switching the algorithm would abandon SHA-256, making every existing Bitcoin ASIC worthless for that chain. The precedent is Bitcoin Gold, which moved to Equihash in 2017 and now trades near $1. No major exchange has listed the BIP-110 chain, and Start9, the node manufacturer, urged users to take no action and wait for the minority chain to die.

The dispute over inscriptions has not been resolved by the fork's failure. The faction that believes non-financial data should be excluded from Bitcoin still exists; it has simply concluded that Bitcoin's governance system will not deliver the outcome it wants. For the broader network, the lesson is that the bar for changing Bitcoin's rules is higher than it has ever been — and that a minority cannot impose consensus changes over the objection of the majority.

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