BIP-110 Fork Stalls at Two Blocks as Bitcoin Miners Refuse to Follow

The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-110 appeared to stall at the weekend, when the nodes that support the proposal broke away from the main network and produced the chain split people had been warning about — a tiny, stalled one.

The split came Saturday at block 961,632, when the proposal entered its mandatory signaling window. Nodes running BIP-110 software began rejecting any block that failed to signal support through version bit 4. When the first block at that height arrived without the signal, those nodes rejected it and peeled away onto a separate chain.

And it has gone almost nowhere since. 

A pseudonymous mining group called Roughnecks produced both BIP-110 blocks — heights 961,632 and 961,633 — using Ocean’s DATUM protocol, then stopped. By Sunday afternoon the enforcing branch remained stuck at 961,633 while Bitcoin’s dominant chain had advanced to 961,744, a gap of 111 blocks and roughly 17 hours without a new block on the fork.

The support was never there. Only 51 of the 2,016 blocks in the preceding difficulty period signaled for the proposal, about 2.53%, against the 55% threshold needed for voluntary lock-in. Since the mandatory window opened, none of the first 113 blocks on the dominant chain have signaled.