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Morning Edition · Sunday, August 9, 2026Published at 2:30 AM EDT · New York
Bitcoin's BIP-110 Chain Splits Off With 2.6% of Miners, Mines Two Blocks and Stalls
The breakaway chain inherited bitcoin's full mining difficulty with almost no hashpower behind it, and because both chains accept identical transactions, holders who move coins risk having those transactions replayed.
Bitcoin reached block 961,632 over the weekend, the height at which nodes running the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 (BIP-110) begin rejecting any block that does not carry a specific signal. The next block arrived without that signal. Those nodes rejected it and separated from the main chain, producing the first deliberate consensus split in bitcoin in years.
The split chain then mined two blocks and stopped. The arithmetic explains why. A fork keeps the difficulty target of the chain it leaves, so a network carrying a small fraction of total hashpower needs a correspondingly larger amount of time to find each block. Miner support for the proposal, which its authors call the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork and which is aimed at limiting inscriptions and large data payloads embedded in transactions, never exceeded roughly 2.6%, far below the 55% threshold its supporters had set. Blocks on the minority chain are now hours apart.
The practical hazard is not the fork's survival but its shared transaction format. Both chains validate the same signatures, so a spend broadcast on one can be rebroadcast on the other. Bitcoin developer Kevin Loaec warned holders not to move coins created on the split chain before separating their balances, because doing so can cause a matching spend of real bitcoin on the main chain. Neither chain has implemented replay protection.
The underlying dispute has not been settled by the outcome. Supporters of BIP-110 argue that arbitrary data storage degrades bitcoin as a monetary network and raises the cost of running a full node. Opponents argue that fee-paying transactions cannot be filtered on ideological grounds and that miners, not activists, decide what is included. What the weekend established is only that the activist side cannot force the question through mandatory signaling when it holds a small share of hashpower.
Veracity: Corroborated
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Comments
1Aug 10, 12:43 AM · edited
At 2.6% of total hashpower, expected block time on the fork is roughly 385 minutes, and the first difficulty retarget downward requires 2016 such blocks, placing that adjustment approximately 540 days away.