BIP-110 Fork Mines Two Blocks and Stalls Under Bitcoin's Full Difficulty

What BIP-110 Proposed to Do

BIP-110, formally called the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, is a proposal to ban non-financial data from Bitcoin transactions for roughly one year. Its targets include Ordinals inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, Rune metadata, and oversized OP_RETURN payloads — data that critics argue inflates bitcoin fees and crowds out financial transfers. The Bitcoin Improvement Proposals repository lists Luke Dashjr as the original drafter and Dathon Ohm, a pseudonym, as the proposal's named author.

The BIPs repository marked BIP-110 as 'Complete' on June 25, 2026, but Bitcoin Core never adopted the proposal. In the two weeks before the fork, miners signaled their preferences with each block they mined. Of 2,016 blocks in that window, only 51 — just 2.53% — carried a BIP-110 signal. The threshold for early activation was 55%, meaning the proposal needed at least 1,109 signaling blocks and fell more than 1,000 short.

Opposition came from prominent Bitcoin figures. Michael Saylor argued the proposal would harm legitimate Bitcoin usage. Peter Todd, a long-standing protocol developer, publicly demonstrated that BIP-110's restrictions can be sidestepped with straightforward technical workarounds, undermining the proposal's core premise. Despite that, a mining entity named Roughnecks chose to activate BIP-110 without broader consensus — beginning the fork that produced the chain now stalled at two blocks.

Two Blocks Mined, One Race Lost

The split began at block height 961,632. Roughnecks, using OCEAN's DATUM mining system, produced block 961,632 on the BIP-110 chain on Saturday, August 8. At the same height, AntPool produced a competing block 961,632 on the dominant Bitcoin chain, winning that race. The result was two chains from the same starting point, with the dominant chain attracting virtually all of the global network's hashpower and the fork chain left far behind.

Roughnecks followed up with block 961,633 on the BIP-110 chain. After that second block, the fork chain went silent. No third block appeared for at least 17 hours — a wait that would strain any proof-of-work chain, let alone one claiming to represent the real Bitcoin. During the same period, the main network continued producing blocks approximately every 10 minutes, as it has for years.

By the time crypto.news published its report at around 4:34 PM UTC on August 9, the dominant chain had reached block 961,744 — 111 blocks ahead of the BIP-110 fork. The fork chain was not formally shut down; it is technically capable of producing more blocks if mining operations join it. But 111 blocks is a gap that widens by one every 10 minutes on the main network.

Why the Fork Chain Is Trapped by Difficulty

Bitcoin's mining difficulty stood at approximately 127.48 trillion at block 961,632. Every block mined anywhere on the Bitcoin protocol must satisfy that threshold. When the BIP-110 chain split from the main network, it did not receive a lower starting difficulty — it inherited the full number, because the protocol does not distinguish between a fork chain and the original at the moment of separation.

The difficulty algorithm recalculates once every 2,016 blocks — one full epoch. The BIP-110 fork chain has produced two of those blocks and needs 2,014 more before its difficulty can drop at all. OCEAN's BIP-110 mining endpoint reported approximately 257 petahashes per second of supporting hashpower. The main network completes a 2,016-block epoch in roughly two weeks; at 257 PH/s, the fork chain's path to even a single retarget stretches far beyond that.

The Bitcoin mining dashboard makes the hashrate disparity easy to visualize: the main network operates at a level orders of magnitude above the 257 PH/s the fork can muster. Until the BIP-110 chain completes its first full epoch, it has no mechanism to reduce its own difficulty — and completing that epoch at its current hashpower is, for practical purposes, nearly impossible.

• Difficulty at block 961,632: ~127.48 trillion (inherited in full by the fork chain)
• Fork chain hashpower reported by OCEAN's endpoint: ~257 PH/s
• Blocks completed in the current epoch: 2 of 2,016
• Blocks remaining before the first retarget: 2,014
• Main network epoch duration at full hashpower: approximately 2 weeks

No Replay Protection Left Wallets Exposed

BIP-110 launched without replay protection. In standard fork design, replay protection is a rule that makes a transaction from one chain invalid if broadcast on the other. Without it, every transaction on the BIP-110 chain is also valid on the main Bitcoin chain, and every main-chain transaction is valid on the fork. Any valid spend on one network can be copied and executed on the other automatically.

Luke Dashjr, the developer credited with BIP-110's original draft, warned publicly on the dominant chain after the split: 'you are now vulnerable to double-spending attacks.' A double-spend lets the same bitcoin be spent on two chains at once, defrauding a recipient who watches only one. Understanding what Bitcoin is clarifies why replay protection is treated as standard practice for any fork that shares a transaction history with its parent chain.

The missing protection has immediate practical consequences. Every wallet that held bitcoin at block 961,632 holds coins on both chains at that moment. Spending those coins — for example, to trade them on a spot market — could inadvertently authorize the same transaction on the other chain. Exchanges and wallet developers received no advance warning to implement safeguards before the fork went live.

Two Blocks Later, the Difficulty Still Wins

The BIP-110 episode demonstrates something Bitcoin's history has shown before: launching a minority fork at the main chain's full difficulty is extremely difficult to sustain. Miners follow economic incentives, and those incentives pointed heavily toward the chain whose block rewards are denominated in the version of bitcoin the market currently recognizes. Roughnecks and OCEAN's DATUM endpoint acted on principle; almost no other mining operation chose to follow.

The pre-fork signaling data underscores how isolated the effort was. In the two weeks before the split, only 51 of 2,016 blocks — 2.53% — signaled BIP-110 support. After the fork, crypto.news noted zero BIP-110-signaling blocks out of 113 mined on the dominant chain. The 55% threshold for early activation was never close to being met, and post-fork alignment behind the dominant chain was immediate and nearly total.

The BIP-110 fork chain is not officially dead, but reaching its first difficulty retarget at current hashpower would take far longer than most mining operations are willing to wait. The story of blocks 961,632 and 961,633 is ultimately a story about the difficulty mechanism working exactly as designed — stable under the main chain and nearly impassable for any minority group that tries to carry Bitcoin's full difficulty without Bitcoin's full hashpower.