Two-Block Wonder: Bitcoin's BIP-110 Fork Speedruns Its Way to Obscurity ⛏️

A controversial Bitcoin Improvement Proposal aimed at curbing non-financial data on the network triggered a chain split over the weekend, but the breakaway fork produced just two blocks in roughly eight hours before stalling out, trailing the main chain by dozens of blocks.

The split occurred at block 961,632 on Saturday, when nodes running BIP-110 software began rejecting any block that failed to signal support for the proposal. A block mined by AntPool without that signal was accepted by the main network and rejected by BIP-110 nodes, while a miner on Ocean pool produced the alternative block the minority chain followed. From that point, Bitcoin continued producing blocks approximately every ten minutes while the splinter chain ground to a near halt.

The stall reflects a structural obstacle. Bitcoin recalibrates its mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks, and the breakaway chain inherited the network's current setting while commanding only a sliver of computing power—about 2.53% of recent blocks signaled for the proposal, far short of the 55% needed to activate without splitting. At that pace, the chain would need roughly 350 days to reach its next difficulty adjustment, versus about two weeks for Bitcoin, leaving blocks hours apart on the minority chain.

BIP-110, as previously reported, is a soft-fork proposal to temporarily bar people from stuffing images, text, and other non-financial data into Bitcoin transactions. Backers argue the practice, popularized by Ordinals inscriptions, clogs the network and drives up fees for ordinary payments. Opponents counter that anyone paying for block space has earned the right to use it as they see fit, and that letting miners and node operators police transactions erodes Bitcoin's censorship resistance. The proposal to change Bitcoin's consensus rules has divided developers, miners, companies, and users over how the network should evolve and who gets to decide.

Strategy's Michael Saylor has been among the critics, warning that turning a spam dispute into a consensus change sets a dangerous precedent. On early Sunday morning, Saylor posted on X: "Bitcoin worked exactly as designed. BIP-110 was free to fork, and the network was free not to follow. The result was decisive: about 99.85% of Bitcoin's hash power stayed with $BTC."