BIP-110 enters mandatory signaling, then stalls
Bitcoin Improvement Proposal BIP-110 moved into its mandatory signaling phase on August 9, but the fork barely got off the ground. When Bitcoin reached block height 961,632, nodes running BIP-110 began rejecting blocks that did not include the required support signal, splitting off a minority chain from Bitcoin’s main chain.
The proposal was designed as a temporary soft fork aimed at limiting non-financial data such as Ordinals inscriptions, images and text from entering Bitcoin transactions. Supporters argued that this kind of data takes up scarce block space, pushes fees higher and drifts away from Bitcoin’s original role as a monetary system.
Support fell well short of the threshold
Bitcoin protocol upgrades usually require miners to signal through blocks before new rules can be locked in and activated. BIP-110 set its activation threshold at 55%, meaning at least 1,109 of the 2,016 blocks produced over a roughly two-week period had to carry support signals. In the final difficulty window before activation, only 51 blocks signaled support, equal to about 2.53%.
For miners, inscription-related transactions have been controversial, but they also generate real fee revenue. Limiting non-financial data could reduce that revenue pool. Signaling support itself carried almost no cost, yet miners still chose not to take part at scale.
Without enough miners and hash power, the BIP-110 nodes could only maintain an independent minority chain. That chain inherited Bitcoin’s current mining difficulty of about 127.48 trillion, but it attracted only a small amount of SHA-256 hash power, which made normal block production impossible. After the fork, Roughnecks mined just two blocks in about eight hours before the chain stalled. Bitcoin’s main chain kept advancing and widened the gap.
According to BIP-110 monitoring data, the branch is still at block height 961,633, while Bitcoin’s main chain has reached 961,833, leaving a gap of about 200 blocks. No new BIP-110 support signals have appeared on the post-fork main chain either.
The reason is simple: Bitcoin mining difficulty does not adjust instantly when hash power changes. It is recalculated only every 2,016 blocks. Because the BIP-110 chain inherited the main chain’s difficulty while having only tiny hash power, its block time slowed sharply. At current ratios, it may take about 350 days before the next difficulty adjustment, compared with roughly two weeks for the main chain.
Roughnecks and PyBLOCK step back
As hash support continued to dry up, the economics and operating capacity of the BIP-110 fork deteriorated quickly, making further mining hard to justify. Roughnecks, the pool that initially supported the fork, said it was suspending related mining operations and would stop mining under the Roughnecks name after a team meeting. It also advised miners currently working on the BIP-110 chain to pause operations until further notice. PyBLOCK later said it was temporarily stopping support for BIP-110 signaling as well, again until further notice.
The fork also raised asset-safety concerns. Because BIP-110 is a soft fork without built-in replay protection, Bitcoin developer Kevin Loaec warned that users would need to separate their assets manually during the early stage of the fork. Without replay protection, a transaction on the forked coin could accidentally move real BTC.
Supporters reject the idea that the proposal is dead
Even as the fork stalled, supporters did not concede defeat. They argued that the lack of sustained hash power was not evidence of weak community consensus, but the result of resistance from large mining pools. Bitcoin Knots maintainer and OCEAN co-founder Luke Dashjr said claims that the proposal was dead were “lies from bad actors” and “gaslighting.” He argued that the chain split was not caused by BIP-110 itself, but by “some malicious pools and miners resisting changes to network rules,” and said BIP-110 had “enough support, past and present,” but was being attacked by a small group.
BIP-110 author Dathon Ohm also said large mining pools had colluded to turn Bitcoin from money into a “toxic data dump,” and that the community is now working on a proposal to change Bitcoin’s proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm. Supporters have recently discussed replacing PoW to reduce reliance on existing Bitcoin miners, with candidate algorithms including RandomX, BLAKE3, Scrypt and Autolykos v2. Dashjr also proposed using a random selection mechanism to prevent miners from preparing in advance. No PoW change has been activated or confirmed.
The proposal has been controversial since the beginning. Critics say that once a transaction pays sufficient fees, Bitcoin should not judge what the transaction is for, and that limiting specific types of data would damage Bitcoin’s long-standing neutrality and censorship resistance.
Criticism of Luke Dashjr intensifies
Earlier this month, Strategy CEO Michael Saylor posted 110 reasons to oppose BIP-110, citing precedent risk, flaws in the activation mechanism and disputes over how the proposal is framed. Saylor said anyone can fork Bitcoin, but without security, utility, capital and users, a fork means little. Consensus, he said, must be earned, not declared.
Well-known analyst PlanB also publicly opposed the proposal, saying supporters of the fork did not really understand Bitcoin’s decentralized design. Blockstream co-founder Adam Back raised technical concerns as well. He said BIP-110 may be marketed as a temporary fix against on-chain “spam data,” but its design could affect Bitcoin’s future upgrade path because it would disable the OP_SUCCESS opcode in Tapscript, which is widely seen as a foundation for future soft forks. He also warned that BIP-110’s limit on Taproot control block size could affect potential Layer 2 efforts such as BitVM.
As the dispute escalated, Luke Dashjr himself became a target of public criticism in the Bitcoin community. Wang Chun, co-founder of F2Pool, said on X after blocking many BIP-110 supporters that Luke Dashjr was bankrupt financially and bankrupt in reputation as well, and mocked the idea that he could next try changing the PoW algorithm, with no better result. Bitcoin Core contributor Mark Erhardt then proposed removing Dashjr’s BIP editor role. He said Dashjr had participated in BIP-110 and abused editing privileges, including assigning the proposal a BIP number early and rapidly merging updates despite making relatively few contributions to BIP editing in recent years. According to Erhardt, trust, communication and coordination between Dashjr and other BIP editors have completely broken down.
In the end, anyone can fork Bitcoin, but without hash power, economic incentive and community consensus, a fork is only a copy of code, not a new network.