Bitcoin 'Anti-Spam' Fork Sputters to a Halt After Mining Just Two Blocks

In brief

• Supporters of BIP-110 split off into a minority Bitcoin chain on Saturday at block 961,632, but it mined only two blocks in about eight hours before stalling, falling dozens of blocks behind the main network.
• The fork inherited Bitcoin's difficulty setting with barely any hashpower—about 2.53% of recent blocks signaled support, far below the 55% activation threshold,
• BIP-110 sought to temporarily block non-financial data like Ordinals inscriptions from transactions, a move critics including Michael Saylor call a dangerous precedent.

The long-simmering fight over a controversial Bitcoin network proposal finally produced a chain split over the weekend, but the breakaway Bitcoin fork sputtered almost immediately, grinding out just two blocks in roughly eight hours before stalling out.

The fork came as a result of a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal known as BIP-110, whose supporters claimed the change would protect the network from unwanted spam and the legal liability that comes from hosting non-financial data on the network. Its detractors, the majority of the Bitcoin community, viewed it as an attempt at censorship.

The fork triggered Saturday at block 961,632, when Bitcoin nodes running BIP-110 software began rejecting any block that failed to signal support for the proposal. A block mined by AntPool without that signal was accepted by the main network and rejected by BIP-110 nodes, while a miner on the Ocean pool produced the alternative the minority chain followed.