Bitcoin (BTC) split into two competing chains Saturday, leaving nodes that enforce the contested BIP-110 rules 18 blocks behind by evening.
Key Points:
- BIP-110 nodes rejected a non-signaling block at height 961,632 and broke away from Bitcoin's main chain.
- The minority chain managed two blocks before stalling, while the dominant chain kept its normal pace.
- Miner support for the proposal never cleared 3%, far short of the 55% threshold its authors set.
Bitcoin Chain Split Begins At Block 961,632
Developer Jameson Lopp confirmed the divergence in a post on Saturday, pointing readers toward a live dashboard that tracks both chain tips. Nodes running BIP-110 began rejecting any block that failed to carry a version bit 4 signal once the network hit height 961,632. AntPool, the pool that won the race for that block, mined it without the signal.
Most of the network accepted it without incident. The BIP-110 camp did not, and its nodes instead followed a rival block at the same height, produced through the Ocean pool by a small mining outfit called Roughnecks.
The minority chain squeezed out a second block at 961,633 and then slowed to a crawl, while the main chain reached 961,651 by Saturday evening.
Simple Mining, an Iowa hosting firm that routes hashrate to Ocean through its DATUM system, landed block 961,634 on the dominant chain. Even hashrate tied to the pool closest to the proposal was not moving in lockstep.
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Saylor And Dashjr Clash Over Bitcoin Fork
Michael Saylor argued hours before the deadline that the plan had failed to win broad miner support and would fork into irrelevance, a view Blockstream chief executive Adam Back shared. Luke Dashjr, who built the Bitcoin Knots client and serves as Ocean's chief technology officer, urged node operators to upgrade at once, warning that older software left them exposed to double-spending.
Mining difficulty also climbed to 127.48 trillion at that same height, cruel timing for a chain with almost no hashrate behind it. Block times on a chain that thin can stretch from the usual ten minutes into hours, or longer. Roughnecks and its allies are now solving against that same target with a sliver of the computing power that secures the main chain.
Ordinals Fight Drove The BIP-110 Push
Formally titled the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, BIP-110 sought a one-year cap on the transaction data fields that carry Ordinals inscriptions and Runes tokens. Its authors asked for 55% miner support, or 1,109 of 2,016 blocks, well under the 95% that past Bitcoin upgrades have generally targeted.
Signaling never approached that bar and drifted between 0.3% and 2.6% across recent periods, even after Ocean switched it on by default in July.
Foundry, ViaBTC and F2Pool, which together with AntPool command most of the network's hashrate, never signaled at all. The window stays open until block 965,664, which the network should reach in roughly four weeks.
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