Bitcoin’s BIP-110 ‘Anti-Spam’ Fork Collapses After Mining Just Two Blocks

Two blocks. That is all a breakaway Bitcoin (BTC) chain managed after spinning off to enforce the BIP-110 anti-inscription proposal. The fork stalled, fell more than 200 blocks behind the main network, and watched roughly 99.85% of hashpower stay right where it was.

The split happened Saturday at block 961,632. Nodes running BIP-110 started rejecting any block that did not signal support for the proposal. Miner backing topped out near 2.53% of recent blocks, Decrypt reported. The proposal needs 55% to activate. It never came close.

BIP-110 would temporarily bar non-financial data, including Ordinals inscriptions, from bitcoin transactions for one year. On any chain enforcing the rule, inscription activity stops. Bitcoin itself keeps running unchanged.

The forked chain pushed out blocks 961,632 and 961,633, roughly eight hours apart, then went quiet. It inherited Bitcoin’s current difficulty setting while commanding a sliver of hashpower. Bitcoin recalibrates difficulty every 2,016 blocks. At that pace, the breakaway chain would need roughly 350 days to reach its next adjustment. Bitcoin will hit its in about two weeks.

The fork’s mandatory signaling window closes at block 963,647. It will not get there.

By Monday, Bitcoin’s main chain had reached block 961,725. The BIP-110 branch sat more than 200 blocks back, CoinDesk reported. Michael Saylor, chairman of Strategy, had the gap at more than 80 blocks on Sunday.

“Bitcoin worked exactly as designed,” Saylor wrote on X on August 9. “BIP-110 was free to fork, and the network was free not to follow. The result was decisive: about 99.85% of Bitcoin’s hash power stayed with Bitcoin.”

What made the split notable was not just the lopsided score but how miners picked sides. Ocean, the mining pool behind nearly all of BIP-110’s pre-fork support, flipped its miners to signal for the proposal by default in July. Mining pools normally decide which transactions go into blocks and what signals those blocks carry.

Simple Mining, a firm running machines through Ocean’s pool, went another way. It produced block 961,634 on the main chain, two blocks past the fork point, without signaling support for BIP-110.

The trick was DATUM, an Ocean protocol that hands block-construction decisions back to individual miners while still pooling hashpower and sharing payouts. A miner can keep Ocean’s payout plumbing and reject the pool’s default policy at the same time.

“Hashrate is a vote you cannot fake, and we decided the proposal wasn’t worth following,” Simple Mining wrote on X. “We chose not to signal and the chain extended on our block.”

Jameson Lopp, co-founder of self-custody firm Casa, had no sympathy for the losing side. “I won’t be ‘welcoming back’ or unblocking any BIP-110 supporters,” he wrote on X on August 9. “They proved themselves to be susceptible to delusional propaganda from folks emanating reality distortion fields.”

Both chains accept identical transactions. A sale on the minority chain can be replayed on Bitcoin, potentially handing a buyer real BTC. No exchange listing for the fork’s coins has been confirmed.