BIP-110 Bitcoin Fork Stalls at Two Blocks as Its Only Miner Quits

The Bitcoin chain enforcing BIP-110 has not produced a block since Saturday night, and the proposal's supporters — including Luke Dashjr, who maintains Bitcoin Knots and is chief technology officer of the mining pool Ocean — are now discussing a change to Bitcoin's proof-of-work algorithm.

Activation is arithmetically out of reach. BIP-110 locks in only at block 963,648 and activates at 965,664, both fixed heights with no date-based timeout, which means the fork has to mine 2,015 more blocks at the full network difficulty before it gets any relief from a retarget.

The split happened at height 961,632 on Aug. 8, when the proposal's mandatory signaling window opened and nodes running the rules began rejecting any block that did not signal bit 4. Two blocks were mined on the enforcing side, both by a self-organized crew called Roughnecks using Ocean's BIP-110 stratum endpoint. Their coinbase fields read "< OCEAN.XYZ > Roughnecks."

By midday Monday in New York the enforcing tip was still 961,633 on mempool.guide, which follows the BIP-110 rules, while Bitcoin had passed 961,890 on mempool.space — a gap of more than 250 blocks and widening by about six an hour.

Proposal Targets Arbitrary Data

The proposal, authored by Dathon Ohm and crediting Dashjr with the original draft, would have added seven temporary consensus rules aimed at arbitrary data. New output scripts would have been capped at 34 bytes, or 83 bytes for OP_RETURN outputs, with data pushes and witness items limited to 256 bytes. Taproot annexes would have become invalid, control blocks capped at 257 bytes, and the OP_SUCCESS and OP_IF/OP_NOTIF opcodes barred from tapscripts. Coins created before activation were exempt, and every rule would have expired after 52,416 blocks, roughly a year.

The target was inscriptions and the data-embedding techniques that followed them, which the BIP argues burden node operators and divert development from Bitcoin's use as money. Peter Todd published the counterexample on the bitcoin-dev mailing list in October 2025, embedding the full text of the proposal in a transaction that complied with its own rules. "Clearly, this approach is ineffective," he wrote. Others objected to the activation design: a 55% miner threshold rather than the 95% used for earlier soft forks, and the mandatory signaling window that turned every non-signaling block invalid for anyone enforcing the rules.

Ocean Signaled Alone

BIP-110 needed 55% of blocks in a retarget period, or 1,109 of 2,016, to activate early. It peaked at 2.53%, or 51 blocks.

All 51 came from Ocean in the period ending at 961,631, according to block data from mempool.space. No other pool signaled once, and Ocean's own 69 blocks were 3.4% of the period. In the current period, BIP-110's own monitor shows zero signaling blocks, because Ocean stopped setting bit 4 after the split.

Michael Saylor, who laid out his opposition to the proposal in a 110-point essay, posted on Sunday: "Bitcoin worked exactly as designed. 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." The 99.85% figure matches neither Ocean's 3.4% share of the final signaling period nor the roughly two of 83 blocks the fork had taken when he posted.

Roughnecks Quit, Then Reversed

Roughnecks stopped mining at 03:40 UTC on Sunday, about six hours after its second block. "We do not see this a defeat for the BIP110 movement but an escalation to the next step," the group wrote. "Anyone who is mining on the BIP110 chain under the current algorithm is advised to stop until further notice."

On Monday it reversed: "We have decided to resume mining ASAP on the stalled chain tip … Bitcoin is alive and well and its reference client is called Knots-RDTS … We will continue mining until a sensible POW change can be implemented to replace the centralized mining pools that left." No block has appeared in the hours since, and the post named no pool or endpoint.

Ocean returned its default stratum endpoint to the non-BIP-110 chain on Sunday morning and said about 0.3 BTC would go to miners whose hashrate was pointed at the fork for roughly 18 hours while they believed otherwise. "To eliminate any possibility that miners were disadvantaged, OCEAN will make a direct Bitcoin rebate payment to affected miners based on the rewards they would have earned on the non-BIP-110 chain during that window," the pool wrote late Sunday, promising payment within 72 hours. The transactions had not been published as of Monday.

Peter Todd, a longtime Bitcoin Core contributor and one of the proposal's sharpest critics, put the cost of the misdirected hashrate at "about $43kUSD/day." He wrote on Monday: "If BIP-110 actually had widespread consensus among economic actors it could have succeeded. The problem is only a small and poor minority thought it was a good idea."

The clearest damage is to the node operators left behind on the fork.

Of 27,046 listening nodes in Bitnodes' snapshot at 15:14 UTC Monday, 3,125 report a block height of exactly 961,633 — the dead tip. Those nodes see no new transactions or blocks. The campaign's own site, bip110.org, now publishes step-by-step instructions for leaving.

Dashjr Insists The BIP has Support

Dashjr, credited in the BIP for the original draft, replied to Ohm on Sunday: "BIP110 has community support. There's just a tiny few bad actors attacking it. PoW change eliminates their threat."

Ohm went further, writing that "it appears that the large mining pools have colluded to turn Bitcoin from money into a toxic data dumping ground by executing a secret hardfork against the Bitcoin node network" and that "the community is working on proposal for a proof-of-work change to fire the miners." No BIP, mailing-list post or code for such a change has been published. The majority chain changed no rules; the BIP-110 clients adopted new ones.

Jameson Lopp, co-founder and chief security officer of custody firm Casa, called the outcome in February. "BIP-110 will NOT reach the 55% activation threshold and thus nothing of consequence will occur until block 961,632 in early August," he wrote. "If OCEAN is the only pool on the fork (which I consider likely) at around 1% total hashrate, they will produce 1 or 2 blocks per day and it will take nearly 3 years for them to reach the next difficulty adjustment."

At the two blocks a day Lopp assumed, the 2,015 blocks to lock-in take about 2.8 years. The fork has managed none in the past two days.

Markets Ignored It

Bitcoin traded at $64,208 on Monday, down 1.5% over 24 hours and up 0.6% on the week, according to CoinGecko. The chain split produced no discernible price move.