BIP-110 Breakaway Chain Faces Make-or-Break Switch to Blake2b

Since Bitcoin split at block 961632 on August 8, the tiny Roughnecks pool has been struggling to maintain its own breakaway chain. The BIP-110 faction managed to mine just four blocks across seven days, which would normally be enough to kill a fork.

However, supporters of the minority chain are planning another drastic measure: abandoning double SHA-256 for Blake2b, a proof-of-work primitive used by only a handful of Nakamoto-consensus chains. This move would allow them to escape the crushing SHA-256 difficulty that has been hindering their progress.

According to Ocean co-founder Luke Dashjr, the minority chain will swap its PoW from SHA-256 to Blake2b in September. The choice reportedly emerged from a randomized handful of PoW hash functions and algorithms.