BIP-110 Fork Falters as Miner Support Falls Short

A contentious Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) has hit a snag just two blocks into its mandatory-signaling phase. BIP-110, which proposes temporary restrictions on how block space can be used for roughly one year, requires at least 55% miner support to activate.

However, with only 2.53% of miners signaling in support, the proposal is unlikely to succeed. The nodes enforcing BIP-110 began rejecting non-signaling blocks, creating a minority chain that has produced just two blocks in eight hours while the main Bitcoin chain advanced 48 blocks.

The breakaway chain inherited Bitcoin's current mining difficulty but has only a small fraction of the total hashpower. This means blocks on the BIP-110 chain arrive hours apart rather than every ten minutes, making it difficult for the fork to sustain itself.