Bitcoin Chain Split Leaves Breakaway Chain in Lurch
A chain split in Bitcoin occurred on Saturday due to a proposed rule change known as BIP-110, which aimed to prevent people from storing non-payment data in transactions for a year. The proposal required miners to agree and mark their blocks with a specific identifier. However, only about 2.6% of blocks carried this mark, which led the computers running BIP-110 software to reject nearly all of Bitcoin's mining power.
The breakaway chain inherited Bitcoin's high mining difficulty but has no market value or exchange listings, leaving miners little incentive to support it. As a result, the forked chain is 326 blocks behind the main network and has stalled at just two blocks produced. The chain cannot lower its mining difficulty until it reaches 2,016 blocks, which is estimated to be more than six years away.
However, some observers caution against declaring the effort a failure too soon. Himanshu Sahay, co-founder of Arch, notes that changes to Bitcoin's rules depend on coordination across miners, developers, and the wider ecosystem, and it is still early to draw conclusions from the initial block production.