Two blocks. That is what a breakaway Bitcoin (BTC) chain produced before its BIP-110 anti-inscription experiment ran out of steam. The fork stalled, dropped more than 200 blocks behind the main network, and saw roughly 99.85% of hashpower refuse to follow.
The split triggered Saturday at block 961,632. Nodes enforcing BIP-110 began rejecting any block that failed to signal support. Miner backing peaked near 2.53% of recent blocks, Decrypt reported. The proposal required 55% to activate. It never got close.
Under BIP-110, non-financial data, including Ordinals inscriptions, would be barred from bitcoin transactions for one year. Any chain enforcing the rule halts inscription activity. Transaction throughput on Bitcoin itself stays the same.
The forked chain produced blocks 961,632 and 961,633, roughly eight hours apart, then stopped. It inherited Bitcoin’s current difficulty setting while holding a sliver of hashpower. Bitcoin recalibrates difficulty every 2,016 blocks. The breakaway chain would need roughly 350 days to reach its next adjustment. Bitcoin will get there in about two weeks.
That piece is new. The mandatory signaling window closes at block 963,647, a mark the fork will not approach.
By Monday the main chain had reached block 961,725, leaving the BIP-110 branch more than 200 blocks behind, CoinDesk reported. Michael Saylor, chairman of Strategy, had the gap at more than 80 blocks on Sunday.
“Bitcoin worked exactly as designed,” Saylor wrote on X on August 9. “BIP-110 was free to fork, and the network was free not to follow. The result was decisive: about 99.85% of Bitcoin’s hash power stayed with Bitcoin.”
The lopsided margin drew notice. So did how miners chose sides. Ocean, the mining pool that accounts for nearly all of BIP-110’s small pre-fork support, switched its miners to signal for the proposal by default in July. Mining pools normally decide which transactions go into blocks and what signals those blocks carry.
Simple Mining, a firm running machines through Ocean’s pool, went a different direction. It produced block 961,634 on the main chain, two blocks past the fork point, without signaling support for BIP-110.
The mechanism was DATUM, an Ocean protocol that hands block-construction decisions back to individual miners while still pooling hashpower and sharing payouts. In practice, a miner keeps Ocean’s payout plumbing and rejects the pool’s default policy.
“Hashrate is a vote you cannot fake, and we decided the proposal wasn’t worth following,” Simple Mining wrote on X. “We chose not to signal and the chain extended on our block.”
Jameson Lopp, co-founder of self-custody firm Casa, was blunt about the losing side. “I won’t be ‘welcoming back’ or unblocking any BIP-110 supporters,” he wrote on X on August 9. “They proved themselves to be susceptible to delusional propaganda from folks emanating reality distortion fields.”
Both chains accept identical transactions. A sale on the minority chain can be replayed on Bitcoin, potentially handing a buyer real BTC. No exchange listing for the fork’s coins has been confirmed.
