A breakaway bitcoin chain mined two blocks and stopped, ending the BIP-110 fork attempt

Supporters of Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 (BIP-110), which sought to limit arbitrary data in bitcoin transactions for a one-year trial, split onto their own chain at block 961,632 and then effectively stopped. The breakaway chain produced two blocks and stalled, while the main network continued at its normal pace.

What stopped the breakaway chain was a matter of arithmetic, not politics. A forked chain inherits the mining difficulty of the network it leaves, so a chain holding a tiny share of total computing power needs hours to find a block that the main network finds in ten minutes. Miner support for the proposal reached 2.53 percent, far short of the 55 percent threshold the proposal itself required. By Sunday the main chain had reached block 961,659, while the minority chain remained at block 961,633.

The unresolved risk is that both chains accept the same transaction formats, so a payment broadcast on one can in principle be replayed on the other. Custodians have warned holders and exchanges to treat balances carefully until the minority chain is abandoned outright.

This episode demonstrates how rarely bitcoin's rules actually change, almost never, and only with overwhelming agreement among the parties that spend money on hardware and electricity. That rigidity is what makes the fixed supply schedule credible, and it is also why improvements favoured by a majority of developers can still fail to pass. Bitcoin traded near 64,700 dollars on Friday, roughly half its level of last October, so the fork was resolved at a time when bitcoin's role as a monetary hedge is already being questioned as gold's price rises.