Bitcoin's BIP-110 Fork Mined Two Blocks and Then Stopped

The attempt to restrict what data Bitcoin transactions may carry has produced the clearest test yet of who actually controls the protocol, and the answer arrived within hours. BIP-110, written by a pseudonymous contributor and framed as a temporary soft fork lasting about twelve months, would cap most fresh output scripts at 34 bytes and OP_RETURN outputs, a way to embed arbitrary data directly in a Bitcoin transaction, at 83 bytes. It entered its mandatory signaling window at block 961,632, needing 1,109 of 2,016 blocks, or 55 percent, to lock in.

Miners did not comply. CoinDesk reported the proposal entering the window with under 3 percent miner support, and F2Pool, among the largest pools by hashrate, publicly refused to signal. When enforcing nodes began rejecting non-signaling blocks, the chain split and the enforcing branch produced two blocks and halted. Because a fork inherits the difficulty target of the chain it leaves, a branch carrying a fraction of a percent of hashpower needs hours to find a block that the main chain finds in ten minutes. crypto.news reports the branch has since fallen about 111 blocks behind, with signaling at zero in the new period.

The unresolved hazard is that this is a soft fork, so both chains accept the same transactions. A payment broadcast to one is valid on the other. There is no replay protection by design, which is the usual property of a soft fork and a genuine risk for anyone transacting across the two while the split persists.

The result is evidence about mechanism, not about the merits of the underlying argument over whether Bitcoin's blockspace should carry arbitrary data. Miner-activated soft forks require miners. A proposal that reaches mandatory signaling with the mining industry actively opposed does not become the rules, it becomes a stalled minority chain. That lesson will not settle the dispute, because the coalition that pushed BIP-110 objects to inscriptions and data storage on grounds that a failed activation does not address.