Bitcoin holders who sell coins from a possible BIP-110 fork could lose real BTC to replay attacks, developer Kevin Loaec warned, as signaling sits near 2.59%.
Key Points:
- A buyer of fork coins can rebroadcast the seller's signed transaction on the main chain and take the original Bitcoin too.
- Mandatory signaling opens at block 961,632, expected Saturday or Sunday, with miner support stuck near 2.59%.
- BIP-110 carries no automatic replay protection, so leaving coins untouched remains the safest option.
BIP-110 Fork Replay Attack Risk
Loaec raised the alarm on X on Aug. 6, just days before the signaling window opens. Should the network split, every holder would end up with an identical balance on each chain, and the second copy may turn out to be worth almost nothing.
A buyer offering a generous price for those new coins can then copy the signed transaction onto Bitcoin (BTC) and collect the same amount at the same address.
That maneuver is known as a replay attack.
The trade does not drain a wallet. Only the coins offered for sale move, and they leave as real Bitcoin rather than the fork version, with a fee paid on both chains. BIP-110 supplies no automatic replay protection, and its restrictions on transaction data do not take effect until roughly block 965,664, which is expected in early September.
The proposal is a temporary soft fork that would keep arbitrary data out of Bitcoin transactions for about a year, and it ships in the Bitcoin Knots client rather than Bitcoin Core. Its mandatory signaling window opens at block 961,632, expected Saturday or Sunday depending on how fast blocks are found, after which nodes running that software reject any block missing the required flag.
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Loaec And Saylor Weigh Fork Odds
Large holders would probably be targeted first, Loaec said. Coins that never move cannot be replayed, because no signed transaction exists for anyone to copy onto the other chain and broadcast. Custody firm Unchained advises that doing nothing is the reasonable course for most people during a contested split, since hand-separating two balances demands a level of experience that most beginners simply do not have.
Miner support stood at roughly 2.59% on Friday, counting 47 of 1,818 blocks against the 1,109 signals needed for an early lock-in, a bar it has not neared all year.
Michael Saylor urged the proposal's backers to stand down this week, arguing that Bitcoin will carry on normally while BIP-110 stalls or forks into irrelevance without major miners.
Resistance has been building for months. Blockstream chief executive Adam Back has called the 55% activation threshold too low to be safe, while the Ocean pool produces nearly all of the blocks that do carry the signal.
Even so, the user-activated design keeps pushing the proposal toward activation whatever miners ultimately decide.
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