BTC chain split stalls as miners boycott

TLDR

Bitcoin (BTC) split into two chains under the BIP-110 soft fork, but the enforcing branch has effectively stalled after miners largely boycotted it.

1. BIP-110 created a minority enforcing chain that fell far behind the dominant Bitcoin chain and stopped producing blocks.
2. Major miners shifted or stayed on the main chain, collapsing hashrate on the BIP-110 fork and limiting risk for ordinary Bitcoin users.
3. The fork now faces either a quiet death or radical changes, while the broader debate over Bitcoins use as pure money versus data storage intensifies.

Deep Dive

1. What Actually Happened

BIP-110 is a proposed temporary soft fork that would restrict certain non-financial data in Bitcoin transactions, targeting things like Ordinals-style inscriptions. It entered a mandatory signaling window where blocks needed a special bit to show miner support.

At block height 961,632, miners produced two competing blocks, splitting Bitcoin into a dominant chain and a BIP-110 enforcing chain. The enforcing branch only managed two blocks (961,632 and 961,633) before stalling, while the main chain kept advancing by dozens of blocks, as documented in reports on the silent miner boycott.

Confidence: high because multiple independent monitoring sites and outlets describe the same split and stalled minority chain.

2. Miner Boycott And User Impact

Miner signaling for BIP-110 remained extremely low, around 2 to 3 percent, versus the 55 percent threshold needed for activation. Key pools like Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool, and others chose not to signal and continued mining the dominant chain.

On the enforcing chain, Ocean-linked hashrate reportedly fell from about 36 exahashes per second to near 1 exahash, and Roughnecks, the group that mined the forks only two blocks, publicly stopped BIP-110 mining and urged others to stand down, as covered in Roughnecks quits BIP-110 mining. That left the minority chain with very slow block times and little economic relevance.

For most users and exchanges, Bitcoin operations continue on the dominant chain as normal. The main practical risk is replay or confusion for anyone deliberately interacting with the minority fork, not for standard BTC holders following the primary network.

3. What To Watch Next

BIP-110 supporters are now discussing next steps, including new coordination or even changing the minority chains proof-of-work algorithm. Without fresh hashrate, though, the fork is likely to drift into obsolescence.

Going forward, three signals matter:

1. Whether any large mining pools start signaling for BIP-110 or join the minority chain.
2. Whether developers formally pivot to a separate chain with different rules rather than trying to force changes onto Bitcoin.
3. How exchanges, wallets, and merchant services clarify which chain they treat as BTC for deposits and withdrawals.

The broader dispute over whether Bitcoin should strictly prioritize monetary transactions or tolerate more arbitrary data is unlikely to disappear, even if this particular fork fails.

Conclusion

The stalled BIP-110 chain shows that miner and economic consensus can veto even passionately supported protocol changes when backing is thin. For now, Bitcoin continues on its dominant chain with minimal disruption, while the BIP-110 experiment highlights how hard it is to redirect Bitcoins rules without broad hashrate and ecosystem support.