BIP-110 Mined Two Blocks: Fork Already Dying
A controversial hard fork of Bitcoin known as BIP-110 mined two blocks on the network before stalling, according to CoinDesk, exposing in real time what critics had warned about for months: a breakaway chain cannot sustain itself on ideology alone when it inherits the full mining difficulty of the original network with only a fraction of its hashpower.
A controversial hard fork of Bitcoin known as BIP-110 mined two blocks on the network before stalling, according to CoinDesk, exposing in real time what critics had warned about for months: a breakaway chain cannot sustain itself on ideology alone when it inherits the full mining difficulty of the original network with only a fraction of its hashpower.
The mechanics are unforgiving. Bitcoin's difficulty adjusts to assume a global army of mining rigs. BIP-110 launched with almost none of them. The result was blocks arriving hours apart — a chain technically alive but functionally unusable, a ghost network minting empty proof of a miscalculation. More dangerously, both chains currently accept the same transactions, creating a brief window of double-spend risk that has already drawn attention from exchange security teams.
No major exchange has confirmed support for BIP-110. The broader Bitcoin developer community had opposed the fork before it launched, arguing the protocol change was neither necessary nor sufficiently tested. The two mined blocks have not been followed by a third.
What BIP-110 has produced, in the absence of a functioning chain, is a live demonstration of how quickly a fork dies without miner consensus — the same lesson written into Bitcoin's history at least twice before, at a cost nobody fully tallied.
The hashpower didn't follow. It never does when the argument isn't strong enough.
