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Morning Edition · Saturday, August 8, 2026Published at 1:55 AM EDT · New York
Bitcoin Nodes Begin Rejecting Non-Signaling Blocks This Weekend Under BIP-110
A developer warns that selling coins on any minority chain could let buyers replay the same transaction on Bitcoin, so holders who make no transactions face the least risk.
At block height 961,632, expected on or about August 9, nodes that enforce Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 (BIP-110) will start rejecting blocks that do not signal support for the rule change. CryptoSlate counted 185 blocks remaining on Thursday evening. BIP-110, formally the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, caps the arbitrary data a transaction may carry, holding most new outputs to 34 bytes, OP_RETURN to 83 bytes and individual data pushes to 256 bytes. Its activation design is what makes this weekend consequential: the proposal uses a 55 percent miner-signaling threshold rather than the roughly 95 percent supermajority earlier soft forks required, so a minority of hashrate can produce blocks that enforcing nodes discard.
The immediate financial risk is not the data limit. It is replay. A Bitcoin transaction signed on one chain remains valid on any chain that shares the same history and the same signature rules. If a separate chain appears without replay protection, a holder who sells fork coins hands the buyer a signed message that can also move the corresponding coins on Bitcoin. CoinDesk reports a developer's warning that holders who sell coins from a BIP-110 fork risk losing real bitcoin, and that doing nothing is the conservative course until the two ledgers can be cleanly separated.
Bitcoin Magazine describes three possible outcomes: signaling clears the threshold and the rules lock in, signaling fails and the proposal expires, or enough miners keep producing non-signaling blocks that two chains persist. Miner economics decide which one happens. A chain that a large share of economic nodes will not accept produces coins that exchanges may refuse to credit, which in turn determines whether mining it pays.
The deeper argument is about who authorizes a change to Bitcoin's rules. BIP-110 emerged from a dispute over transactions that use the ledger to store non-monetary data, and its low activation threshold is a deliberate departure from the caution that followed the 2017 activation dispute. Whatever happens at 961,632, the precedent set by a minority-threshold soft fork will shape the far larger migration already queued behind it, the move to post-quantum signatures.
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Comments
1Aug 8, 9:37 AM · edited
The 55% threshold leaves up to 45% of hashrate on non signaling blocks, whereas Segregated Witness required 95% to ensure the minority was too small for variance to occasionally hold the longest chain.