BIP-110 Fork Stalls After Two Blocks: Where Is Bitcoin's "Junk Data" Debate Headed?

In the early hours of August 9, Beijing time, Bitcoin reached block height 961,632, marking the start of BIP-110’s mandatory signaling period. Nodes enforcing the BIP-110 rules began rejecting blocks that did not signal version bit 4 and split from the main chain. The BIP-110 branch produced only two blocks before stalling, while the Bitcoin main chain continued producing blocks normally.

During the preceding difficulty adjustment period, only 51 blocks signaled support, representing 2.53% of the total and falling far short of the proposal’s 55% threshold for voluntary early lock-in. This indicated that BIP-110 had failed to secure broad miner support and ultimately resulted in a minority chain with extremely little hash power.

What Is BIP-110 Intended to Address?

BIP-110, formally titled “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork,” was submitted by pseudonymous developer Dathon Ohm, with Luke Dashjr providing input on an early draft. The proposal seeks to introduce seven consensus restrictions for approximately one year. These include limiting ordinary new output scripts to 34 bytes, restricting new output scriptPubKeys whose first opcode is OP_RETURN to 83 bytes, capping several types of data pushes and witness stack elements at 256 bytes, and limiting certain Taproot functionality.