BIP-110 Breakaway Chain Faces a Long Fight to Survive

What Happened?

The BIP-110 faction broke from the main Bitcoin network and managed to grind out a microscopic four-block chain tip. That would normally kill a fork cold, but BIP-110 proponents have another escape route: ditch the minority chain’s crushing SHA-256 difficulty by replacing its PoW cryptographic hash function entirely. Word on the street is that the PoW switch could land in September.

As of today, Roughnecks had dragged the minority chain to block 961635, only for it to stall again after that block was mined three days ago on Aug. 12. Block 961636 has since accumulated a staggering pile of fees, but with virtually zero exchange support, nobody can put a credible price on the BIP-110 forked asset and how much those fees would be worth.

The Plan: Blake2b

BIP-110 proponents, including Ocean co-founder Luke Dashjr, say the minority chain will swap its PoW from SHA-256 to Blake2b. The choice reportedly emerged from a randomized handful of PoW hash functions and algorithms. Importantly, replacing the minority chain’s PoW hash function does not invent or adopt an entirely new consensus mechanism.

The original Blake dates to 2008, while Blake2 arrived on Dec. 21, 2012, from Christian Winnerlein, Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Samuel Neves and Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn. Blake2b is the optimized 64-bit variant of the primitive, built for higher performance on modern processors. Blake2b was engineered to outrun SHA-256 on modern 64-bit processors while still targeting an equivalent or stronger level of cryptographic security.