Bitcoin miners clash over BIP-110 fork risk

TLDR

Bitcoin miners and node operators are in a contentious BIP-110 upgrade attempt that has already produced a brief chain split and renewed fears of a fork.

1. BIP-110 is a one-year reduced data soft fork limiting non-financial data, now in mandatory signaling with under 3% miner support and a minority chain that has already stalled.
2. Fork risk comes from BIP-110 nodes rejecting most miners blocks, creating a weak minority chain without built-in replay protection that could endanger careless transactions.
3. The key signals now are miner signaling, hashpower on the BIP-110 branch, and how exchanges and wallets choose to recognize or ignore any forked coins.

Confidence: high because multiple independent technical and news sources report the same block height, signaling levels, and chain behavior.

Deep Dive

1. What BIP-110 Does

BIP-110 is a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal that would temporarily restrict non-payment data on-chain, targeting things like Ordinals inscriptions and large OP_RETURN payloads for roughly one year.

It entered its mandatory signaling phase at block 961,632, with just 2.53% of recent blocks signaling (51 of 2,016), far below the 55% threshold set for activation. Nodes enforcing BIP-110 now reject blocks that do not set version bit 4, while ordinary nodes still accept all valid blocks. This is being pushed as a user-activated soft fork rather than a miner-led upgrade, with vocal critics including Michael Saylor and Adam Back, and supporters such as Luke Dashjr and pseudonymous author Dathon Ohm.

2. How Fork Risk Emerges

Because BIP-110 nodes reject the non-signaling blocks that almost all miners are producing, a split has already appeared at block 961,632, with Antpool mining the main-chain block and Roughnecks mining a rival BIP-110-compliant block. The BIP-110 branch quickly stalled due to very low hashpower while the main chain continued to advance, suggesting no viable second network yet.

The main technical danger is a replay scenario: if both chains were to keep going without early replay protection, a transaction broadcast on the weaker fork could be replayed on the main chain, causing holders to lose real BTC after trying to sell fork coins. Some BIP-110 advocates have even discussed a proof-of-work change for the minority chain, which would harden the split into a separate asset if implemented.

3. What To Watch Next

Three things matter now.

1. Miner signaling and hashpower: if signaling stays under a few percent and hashpower on BIP-110 stays tiny, the minority chain is likely to remain stalled or irrelevant.
2. Node and exchange policy: watch whether major exchanges, custodians, and wallets announce support or non-support for BIP-110 coins, and whether they add explicit replay protection or special handling.
3. Governance outcome: if the minority branch dies, it will be read as a failed user-activated soft fork; if it survives with a different proof of work, it becomes a separate BIP-110 coin, with its own market and risks.

Conclusion

BIP-110 has turned a long-running debate over inscriptions and block space into a live governance stress test for Bitcoin, briefly splitting the chain even with very low miner support.

For now, the main Bitcoin network clearly retains the economic and hashpower majority, but any attempt to sustain a BIP-110 branch, especially with a new proof of work, would convert todays policy fight into a full asset split, raising replay and operational risks for anyone moving coins during the transition.