TLDR
A BIP-110-enforcing minority Bitcoin chain has stalled after two blocks, and its supporters are now openly discussing a proof-of-work reset to revive it and sidestep incumbent miners.
- BIP-110 split Bitcoin at block 961632, but the minority chain inherited full Bitcoin difficulty with around 0% to 2.6% hashpower and quickly stopped producing blocks.
- Backers are debating switching the minority chain to a new mining algorithm, which would not touch Bitcoins main SHA-256d chain but would effectively turn the fork into a separate network.
- The key things to watch are whether a specific PoW proposal, activation height, and node support emerge, and how exchanges and infrastructure treat any revived fork.
Deep Dive
1. How The BIP-110 Fork Stalled
BIP-110 (Reduced Data Temporary Softfork) is a proposal to tightly limit non-financial data in Bitcoin transactions for about a year, targeting inscriptions like Ordinals and other large payloads Cointelegraph overview.
When its mandatory signaling window began at block 961632 on 8 Aug 2026, nodes running BIP-110 started rejecting blocks that did not set version bit 4. This created a minority BIP-110 chain while the dominant chain continued as normal. Support from miners never exceeded roughly 2.6%, so the forked chain inherited Bitcoins difficulty of around 127.48 trillion with only a sliver of hashpower and mined just two blocks before effectively stalling Bitcoin.com report.
Ocean-linked pool Roughnecks, which mined the only two minority-chain blocks, then halted BIP-110 mining as Oceans hashrate collapsed, leaving the enforcing chain stuck while the main Bitcoin network advanced normally hashrate collapse coverage.
The BIP-110 fork currently has no practical block production and functions more like a stalled experiment than a live alternative to Bitcoin.
2. Impact On Bitcoin Users And Markets
The contemplated PoW reset is scoped to the minority chain. Bitcoins main chain continues on SHA-256d with almost all hashpower and institutional support, so base-layer security and normal BTC usage remain intact.
Real risks cluster around replay and operational edge cases. Because both chains initially accepted identical transactions, spending coins on the minority chain could, in some scenarios, interact with the same UTXOs on mainnet, creating replay-style hazards for anyone trying to trade fork coins Coindesk analysis. Some Lightning operators preemptively closed channels around the split to avoid ambiguity in accounting and settlement Bitcoin.com coverage.
Market impact so far is mostly narrative: the episode underscores how hard it is to push a contentious consensus change without broad miner and economic support, and reinforces Bitcoins bias toward status quo rules.
For ordinary BTC holders, the immediate risk is low, but interacting with any BIP-110 fork coins or tooling requires extra caution until replay and settlement policies are clearly defined.
3. What A PoW Reset Would Mean Next
Facing a difficulty trap, some BIP-110 backers, including pseudonymous author Dathon Ohm and developer Luke Dashjr, are debating a proof-of-work algorithm change to fire the miners and escape dependence on existing SHA-256d ASICs minority chain PoW reset debate.
Options discussed span CPU and GPU-friendly schemes like RandomX and BLAKE3, or other ASIC-followed algorithms such as Scrypt. Experimental code for a PoW switch has been rebased by developer Chris Guida, but no concrete algorithm, activation height, or consensus decision has been set. Some supporters float a possible consensus change window as early as September, though this remains speculative and contingent on coordination.
If executed, a PoW reset would make the minority chain a clearly distinct network with its own mining ecology and risk profile, more akin to a new altchain than Bitcoin with a tweak.
The real inflection point is not the stalled fork, but whether BIP-110 backers coalesce around a PoW change and attract enough users, miners, and venues to justify treating the revived chain as a standalone asset.
Conclusion
BIP-110s minority chain shows what happens when a user-activated soft fork lacks broad miner and economic backing: it splits, then stalls under full Bitcoin difficulty. The emerging PoW reset debate is an attempt to salvage that experiment by severing the forks reliance on existing ASIC miners, but unless a clear algorithm, timeline, and ecosystem support materialize, Bitcoins main chain and BTCs role in the market remain largely unaffected while the minority chain drifts toward niche status.
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