A Bitcoin soft fork built around BIP-110 split from the main chain after block 961,632 this week, and it barely got off the ground. The pool backing it, Roughnecks, mined exactly two blocks before the rest of the network’s hashpower left it stranded.

The split was supposed to test whether a determined group of node operators could force miners to fall in line on data spam. Instead, it showed how little leverage a minority actually has once the hashrate refuses to follow.

The Fork Stalls Within Hours

BIP-110 needed miners to signal support by block 961,632, or a mandatory signaling rule would take over. When AntPool mined the first non-signaling block, nodes running Bitcoin Knots split into their own chain. Roughnecks found blocks 961,632 and 961,633 on that branch, then nothing more. Bitcoin’s original chain kept moving at its usual pace and reached block 961,651, opening an 18-block lead within about a day.

The math comes down to difficulty. Bitcoin’s mining difficulty had just adjusted to 127.48T, a target both chains inherited. With only a sliver of total hashpower behind it, the BIP-110 branch found blocks far slower than the usual ten minutes.

BIP-110 supporter Matthew Kratter admitted that the minority chain would need “massive change” to catch up. It never came. By the time Michael Saylor addressed the split, he put the gap at more than 80 blocks and said roughly 99.85 percent of Bitcoin’s hashpower had stayed with the main chain.

Lyn Alden made a similar distinction on August 9, saying the majority of miners, economic nodes, and exchanges continued with the non-fork.

“It’s not that miners are in control,” she wrote. “The fork just didn’t have consensus.”

BIP-110 supporters have rejected that conclusion. Luke Dashjr wrote on August 9 that claims of the proposal’s failure were false. Earlier, he had argued that BIP-110 remained uncontested because no counter-fork had emerged.

However, Roughnecks put out a tweet asking those mining on the BIP-110 chain under the current algorithm to stop until further notice, with investor Fred Krueger pointing out that the lead had grown from “153 to 2.”

Bitcoin’s price barely moved through any of it. BTC traded around $65,000, up modestly on the day and nearly 4% for the week, though still down close to 45% from a year earlier.

Dispute Over Data, Not Just Block Counts

The underlying fight traces back to Bitcoin Core dropping its old limit on OP_RETURN data, which let more non-monetary data, like Ordinals and Runes, fill up blocks that BIP-110 backers wanted reserved for payments.

Farside Investors had warned weeks earlier that the fix carried its own risk. Wallets using Miniscript could still generate addresses built on soon-to-be-banned Taproot scripts, and any bitcoin sent to them after activation would become unspendable. Pay-to-public-key outputs, an old script format holding more than 1.7 million BTC, faced new restrictions too, though existing units could still be spent.

Not everyone who backed BIP-110’s goals agreed with how the attempt played out. Writer Secure Sovereign, who supported the underlying fix but not this activation path, said the effort left BIP-110 as “a distant minority with no realistic path to catching the main chain,” arguing miners never faced real risk of being forked off themselves.

Days later, Bitcoin developer Murch moved to remove Luke Dashjr from his role as a BIP editor, citing his handling of the proposal as a conflict of interest, a dispute still playing out on Bitcoin’s mailing list.

Source: CryptoPotato