BIP-110 Fork Fails After Two Blocks as Saylor Calls Bitcoin's Response Decisive
Bitcoin's long-running fight over how to treat non-financial data in transactions boiled over into a real chain split this past weekend, and it was over within hours.
THE SPLIT AT BLOCK 961,632
The break came Saturday afternoon at block 961,632, the point where mandatory signaling for the BIP-110 soft fork began. The split began at block 961,632, opening a two-week period during which BIP-110 nodes would require every new block on the forked chain to signal support, and AntPool mined the first block without that signal. Standard Bitcoin nodes accepted AntPool's block. BIP-110 nodes rejected it and instead followed an alternative block produced through Ocean by Roughnecks, a miner using Ocean's DATUM protocol. That gave BIP-110 supporters their own chain to build on, but almost nothing to build it with.
WHY THE FORK NEVER GOT OFF THE GROUND
The rule change needed 55% of hashpower to signal support before it could activate cleanly. It never got close. In the previous 2,016-block period, only 51 blocks signaled support for BIP-110, or 2.53% of the total. By the time the split hit, miner support had peaked at about 2.6%, far below the 55% the proposal needed.
The minority chain produced exactly two blocks and stalled. It produced blocks 961,632 and 961,633 before stalling, while bitcoin kept producing blocks roughly every ten minutes, and by Monday a live monitor showed the main chain more than 200 blocks ahead. The math behind that gap is brutal for the fork's chances: the breakaway chain cannot make mining easier until it completes 2,016 blocks at its current pace, which one monitor put at 350 days away, against 14 days for Bitcoin.
The sharpest moment came from Simple Mining, a pool that mines through Ocean's own DATUM protocol, the same infrastructure BIP-110's supporters had leaned on. On Sunday, Simple Mining chose not to signal for BIP-110 and instead mined a block for Bitcoin's main chain. "We chose not to signal and the chain extended on our block," the company said. Ocean has been closely tied to the BIP-110 camp, so watching its own infrastructure produce the winning block for the opposing side landed as one of the weekend's sharper ironies.
SAYLOR CALLS THE RESULT DECISIVE
Strategy chairman Michael Saylor treated the outcome as proof of concept for Bitcoin's design rather than a crisis. "Bitcoin worked exactly as designed," he wrote. "BIP-110 was free to fork, and the network was free not to follow. The result was decisive: about 99.85% of Bitcoin's hashpower stayed with Bitcoin. The BIP-110 branch mined only two blocks and is already more than 80 blocks behind." He closed with a line BIP-110 advocates will not enjoy: "Consensus is earned, not declared."
BIP-110's creator, Dathon Ohm, framed the same events on X as an assault rather than a market test, arguing that large mining pools had colluded to turn Bitcoin into a toxic data dump through what he called a secret hard fork against the node network. The claim did not hold up well against the visible facts of the weekend: the split was scheduled in advance, tracked in real time by multiple public monitors, and settled by hashpower that was never hidden from anyone watching.
WHAT ACTUALLY MOVED
The forked chain drew a small, vocal following of node operators, but node count was never the real constraint. Wallets, exchanges, and the overwhelming majority of miners simply kept operating on Bitcoin's existing rules. The argument that Bitcoin needs a mechanism to push back against inscriptions and other non-monetary data did not lose supporters this weekend. What it lost was the bet that hashpower would move to enforce that view, and hashpower is the only vote that decides which chain survives.
The mechanics echo Bitcoin's 2017 split from Bitcoin Cash, a fork that preceded one of Bitcoin's strongest rallies. Whether that pattern repeats is a separate question from what happened this weekend: a rule change backed by roughly 2.6% of hashpower tried to force a network-wide change, and the network kept moving without it.
This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.
