BIP-110 Enforcing Branch Grinds to a Halt with Meager Block Production
The Bitcoin branch enforcing BIP-110 has stalled at block 961,633 after producing only two blocks. This comes as the non-enforcing chain advances to 961,721, widening the gap between them to 88 blocks.
According to the BIP-110 monitor, the last block produced on this branch was mined about 12 hours before being updated. It is reported that a pseudonymous mining group called Roughnecks used Ocean's Decentralized Alternative Templates for Universal Mining (DATUM) protocol to produce these blocks.
The divergence started after BIP-110 entered mandatory signaling at block 961,632 on Saturday, with only 51 of the preceding 2,016 blocks signaling support. This means that under this proposal, nodes will reject blocks not signaling through version bit 4, while regular Bitcoin nodes accept both signing and non-signaling blocks.
Mandatory signaling for BIP-110 continues until block 963,647. As this enforcing branch must mine through the remainder of the 2,016-block adjustment period before its difficulty can adjust, progress on this branch is expected to be slow without substantial additional hashpower.