Bitcoin Fork BIP-110 Stalls After Only Two Blocks
The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-110 fork has stalled just two blocks into existence. The new chain, created by supporters of BIP-110, was meant to temporarily ban non-financial data in transactions to reduce congestion and costs. However, with only 2.53% of recent mining support, the forked chain faces slow block times, no realistic path to meeting its signaling deadline, and exposes users to replay-style risks.
The BIP-110 fork happened at block 961,632 when computers running BIP-110 software began rejecting any block that did not signal support for the proposal. The main bitcoin chain has reached block 961,681, a gap of 48 blocks representing most of a day's worth of activity on one side and almost none on the other.
The stall is due to the mechanical cause of Bitcoin recalculating how difficult mining is every 2,016 blocks. The breakaway chain inherited bitcoin's current setting but has a tiny share of the machines, so its blocks arrive at long intervals. It cannot make mining easier until it completes 2,016 blocks at that pace.