BIP-110’s Minority Chain Stalls After Just 2 Blocks as Main Chain Pulls 111 Blocks Ahead

The BIP-110 debate stopped being theoretical over the weekend. Nodes actually enforcing it split onto their own chain, and the result was about as decisive a verdict as Bitcoin’s governance process ever produces.

Bitcoin nodes enforcing BIP-110 split onto a minority chain at block 961,632 when mandatory signaling began around 19:35 UTC on August 8. Only 2.53% of blocks had signaled support, far short of the 55% threshold the proposal needed to activate safely. The minority chain produced just two blocks in roughly eight hours before effectively stalling, while the main chain advanced more than 48 blocks over the same window, a gap that had grown to over 111 blocks by Monday.

A miner has since publicly rejected BIP-110, notable specifically because they mine through a pool that had signaled support for the proposal, a small but telling sign of the gap between pool-level signaling and genuine miner conviction underneath it.

This is close to the cleanest possible real-world demonstration of how Bitcoin’s soft fork activation process is supposed to work: a proposal without sufficient broad support simply fails to gain traction, its minority chain withers from lack of continued mining power, and the network as a whole continues on its existing path without any central authority needing to intervene or force a resolution.

Whether BIP-110’s proponents pursue a different activation path going forward remains an open question, but this specific signaling attempt has, for all practical purposes, already failed.

Want to understand exactly how Bitcoin soft fork signaling and activation thresholds work? Learn more in the Bitcoin Academy.