Bitcoin Drama and Ethereum Upgrades Steal the Spotlight
The Bitcoin network saw some drama in August as the BIP-110 proposal failed to gain traction. The proposal aimed to temporarily restrict certain types of non-financial data inscription, but miner support only reached around 2.5%. As a result, nodes enforcing BIP-110 began rejecting blocks that didn't signal support, creating a separate minority chain.
However, this chain produced only two blocks before stalling, while the main Bitcoin network continued to operate normally. This episode highlighted the importance of broad coordination among miners, nodes, users, and economic participants for protocol changes to be successful.
Bitcoin Core v32 reached feature freeze on August 20, with developers now focusing on bug fixes and minor optimizations ahead of its final release in October. The major improvements include parallel block validation across multiple CPU cores, increasing validation speed by around 3x.