Controversial Bitcoin fork BIP-110 mines two blocks, then stops

BIP-110

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal-110 (BIP-110) was a contentious proposal designed to temporarily restrict the storage of non-financial data, such as images and text, within Bitcoin transactions for a period of one year. Proponents argued that this measure would alleviate network congestion and subsequently lower transaction fees for users primarily interested in financial payments. They believed that the current practice of embedding arbitrary data was inefficient and burdened the network unnecessarily, pushing up operational costs for legitimate payment transactions.

Conversely, critics of BIP-110 maintained that any user paying the requisite transaction fee should have the autonomy to utilize block space as they see fit. This perspective emphasizes user freedom and the decentralized nature of Bitcoin, suggesting that miners and node operators should not dictate the legitimacy or type of data stored. The debate underscored a fundamental philosophical divide within the Bitcoin community regarding the network's primary purpose and the extent of its censorship resistance.

AntPool

The initiation of the BIP-110 fork was directly tied to the actions of specific mining entities. The Bitcoin mining firm AntPool played a pivotal role by mining the first non-signaling block, which was accepted by the broader Bitcoin network but rejected by nodes running the BIP-110 software. This divergence marked the official split, as BIP-110 nodes began to follow an alternative chain.

Following AntPool's action, a miner operating under the Ocean pool produced the block that the breakaway BIP-110 chain adopted. This sequence of events illustrates how the collective decisions and actions of major mining pools can directly influence the trajectory of proposed protocol changes, either by supporting them or by maintaining the status quo. The lack of widespread support from other significant mining operations ultimately doomed the BIP-110 fork to an immediate and decisive failure.

2,016 Blocks

The technical failure of the BIP-110 fork was primarily due to Bitcoin's inherent difficulty adjustment mechanism, which recalculates mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks to maintain an average block time of ten minutes. The breakaway BIP-110 chain inherited the main Bitcoin network's current difficulty setting but possessed only a minuscule fraction of the total hashpower. This severe imbalance meant that blocks on the fork chain were produced hours apart, rather than every ten minutes.

Crucially, the fork chain could not adjust its mining difficulty downwards to match its limited hashpower until it had completed 2,016 blocks at this agonizingly slow pace. The article noted that at its current rate, this adjustment would take approximately 350 days, rendering the chain practically unusable and unable to meet its signaling deadline of 14 days. This mechanical constraint effectively trapped the BIP-110 chain in an unrecoverable state, demonstrating the robust self-regulating nature of Bitcoin's protocol against minority forks lacking substantial computational backing.