BIP-110 Split Farce Comes to an End: A High-Profile “Bitcoin Fork” Ultimately Became an Ignored Orphan Chain
August 8, early morning.
Bitcoin block height 961,632.
A small number of nodes decided to leave the mainnet and implement the BIP-110 rules.
The media began hyping it: “Bitcoin has split in two!”
Are you panicking?
Don’t. Let’s see how this “forked chain” is doing now—
While the Bitcoin main chain had advanced to block 961,651, the BIP-110 fork chain had mined only two blocks, remaining at 961,633.
It was 18 to 20 blocks behind the main chain.
And the gap is still growing.
This fork farce, portrayed as “the biggest governance crisis in Bitcoin’s history,” went from launch to complete irrelevance in less than 48 hours.
Let’s go through it from the beginning.
In December 2025, a developer using the pseudonym Dathon Ohm proposed BIP-110. Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr provided the original draft proposal.
The proposal: Restrict the inclusion of non-financial data such as Ordinals inscriptions in Bitcoin blocks within one year.
Supporters said: Inscriptions are “spam transactions” that consume block space and drive up fees; Bitcoin should focus on being money.
Sounds pretty reasonable, right?
But the problem is—nobody agreed.
Let’s see how this turned into a “farce.”
In July, Michael Saylor published a 10,000-word article listing 110 reasons for opposition. He said BIP-110 was an “iatrogenic proposal for Bitcoin”—a treatment that could cause new harm.
That same month, Blockstream CEO Adam Back directly lashed out, calling it “Idiocracy.” He said the essence of BIP-110 was an attempt to constrain others’ behavior through the consensus layer, which runs completely counter to Bitcoin’s core attributes of decentralization and permissionlessness.
On August 4, Saylor publicly refused to support it, citing a miner support rate of only 2.7% and saying the 55% threshold was “mathematically impossible to reach.”
On August 8, at block 961,632, the fork occurred.
And then?
Then nothing happened.
Data showed that BIP-110 miner signaling support fluctuated between just 0.3% and 2.6%.
No major mining pool publicly supported it. Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool, ViaBTC—all remained silent.
Over the past two weeks, only 2.53% of blocks signaled support.
The 55% threshold? It did not even come close.
The nodes supporting BIP-110 mainly came from users running Bitcoin Knots. The only mining pool to publicly support BIP-110 was Ocean, owned by Luke Dashjr.
One mining pool holding up an entire chain.
Even more absurdly—this fork lacked even basic security protection.
Ledger issued a warning: BIP-110 has no built-in replay protection.
What does that mean?
If you recklessly transfer or trade assets on the fork chain, the real BTC on the main chain could also be transferred away.
Developer Kevin Loaec also warned that selling the forked coins could result in real BTC being stolen.
A forked chain that cannot even guarantee security—and you’re telling me this is “the future of Bitcoin”?
Here’s the painful truth—
BIP-110 went from a “groundbreaking proposal” to being ignored in just 8 months.
Even at its peak, support was below 3%.
A high-profile “Bitcoin fork crisis” ultimately ended with virtually zero support.
Bitcoin was not “split in two”; on the contrary, this proved its ability to “remain united.”
This shows that Bitcoin’s governance mechanism is more robust than anyone imagined.
The dual thresholds of miner signaling and community consensus worked perfectly in this incident.
What is the outcome when a proposal without broad support forcibly forks?
An orphan chain 20 blocks behind the main chain, with only two blocks, that could stop producing blocks at any time.
Because Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment mechanism depends on stable hashing power, when a minority chain loses sufficient miner support, block generation times can stretch from 10 minutes to several hours or even several days.
This is not a fork. It is a slow death.
Bitcoin was not “split in two”; on the contrary, this proved its ability to “remain united.”#非农爆雷降息预期逆转 #周末行情分析 #CLARITY法案投票窗口即将关闭 $BTC $ETH $SOL