A breakaway Bitcoin chain designed to strip non-financial data such as Ordinals inscriptions out of transactions has effectively collapsed within hours of launch, mining just two blocks before stalling out. The fork, built around a proposal called BIP-110, activated Saturday at block 961,632 when nodes running the software began rejecting any block that failed to signal support for it.
The numbers made the outcome look inevitable almost immediately. Decrypt reported that only 2.53% of recent blocks had signaled support for BIP-110, far short of the 55% hashpower threshold the proposal needed to lock in without splitting the network. Mining pool AntPool refused to signal for the change, while Ocean was the pool that ultimately produced the alternative chain's blocks.
A Chain That Barely Moved
With so little hashpower behind it, the BIP-110 chain fell more than 80 blocks behind Bitcoin's main network within hours, and its blocks were arriving hours apart rather than the roughly 10-minute intervals the main chain maintained. The disparity extends to when each chain will next recalibrate its mining difficulty: Bitcoin's main network is roughly two weeks from its next adjustment, while the BIP-110 chain, at its current pace, is an estimated 350 days away. Identical transactions valid on both chains also create a replay risk that will persist until block 963,647, a height the fork is not expected to reach.
Saylor and Bitcoin Veterans Push Back
The fork drew swift and pointed opposition from prominent figures in Bitcoin. Strategy chairman Michael Saylor summed up the mining data bluntly:
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About 99.85% of Bitcoin's hashpower stayed with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Core contributor Jameson Lopp was more combative, saying he would not welcome BIP-110 supporters back to the main chain and describing their arguments as "delusional propaganda" tied to a pattern of harassment. Adam Back and Samson Mow were also among the figures who came out against the proposal, with critics warning that filtering transactions by content type sets a precedent that is difficult to walk back — what starts as blocking Ordinals data, they argued, could later extend to filtering transactions from specific addresses or jurisdictions.
Why the Anti-Spam Debate Keeps Resurfacing
BIP-110 is the latest attempt by a vocal minority of Bitcoin users to push back against the explosion of Ordinals inscriptions and similar non-financial data clogging block space, a grievance that has simmered since Ordinals activity first surged in 2023. But as with earlier contentious fork attempts, the economic reality of Bitcoin's mining market reasserted itself almost instantly: without overwhelming hashpower consensus, a breakaway chain is left with a fraction of the security budget, sluggish block production, and little practical path to survival. For now, Bitcoin's spam debate remains a policy argument rather than a network split.
