BIP-110 Fork Halts After Mining Two Blocks, Leaving the Crypto Community Uncertain of Its Path Forward

A prominent Bitcoin mining operation, AntPool, successfully mined the first non-signalling block that the broader network accepted, while a separate miner operating under the Ocean pool generated the alternative chain that BIP-110 ultimately chose to follow.

AntPool and Ocean are mining pools, where multiple operators collaborate their computing resources and share in the rewards.

The halt is driven by a fundamental mechanical constraint. Bitcoin recalculates its mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks to ensure a consistent block arrival time of roughly ten minutes.

The competing chain adopted Bitcoin’s current difficulty settings but operates with a significantly smaller share of machines. Consequently, the blocks are arriving at infrequent intervals. It remains unable to accelerate the process until it successfully mines the next 2,016 blocks at the current pace, which the monitoring system estimates to be 350 days away. This contrasts sharply with the 14 days required for the Bitcoin network to process the difficulty change.

Currently, only 2.53% of the total blocks have signaled for BIP-110 over the past two weeks, falling significantly short of the 55% threshold required to activate it without a network split.

This creates an awkward dynamic for anyone looking to trade the forked coin. Since both chains recognize identical transactions, a signed transaction sending fork coins is also valid on the Bitcoin network. A buyer can rebroadcast this transaction on the Bitcoin network and collect actual BTC from the same seller, which introduces an entirely novel attack vector that users should monitor carefully.

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