BIP 110 Minority Chain Splits From Bitcoin and Stalls After Two Blocks
Bitcoin nodes enforcing BIP 110 rejected a non-signaling block at height 961,632 and followed a minority branch instead. With miner support at only a few percent, the branch produced two blocks before stalling, turning months of argument over arbitrary transaction data into a real-world demonstration of how little hashpower supported the proposed restrictions.
The dispute surrounding BIP 110 moved from political and technical argument into an actual Bitcoin chain split on August 8. BIP 110, the “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork,” proposed temporarily restricting some forms of non-financial data placed inside Bitcoin transactions. Supporters argued that arbitrary data imposed costs on node operators and diverted Bitcoin from monetary use; opponents argued that miners and users paying for block space should be free to use valid transactions without additional consensus restrictions.
The proposal required blocks to signal support beginning at height 961,632. When AntPool mined that block without the required version bit, nodes enforcing BIP 110 rejected it. A competing block satisfying the proposal's signaling requirement was produced, creating a separate minority branch. The split was therefore caused by the mandatory signaling rule rather than by the later data restrictions themselves.
The experiment quickly exposed the difference between visible node support and economically meaningful mining support. Recent miner signaling had reached only about 2.53%, far below the proposal's 55% threshold. The BIP 110 branch inherited Bitcoin's full mining difficulty but only a tiny fraction of its hashpower. It produced two blocks and then effectively stopped while Bitcoin's main chain continued producing blocks at its normal pace.
The episode became historically important because it made an abstract governance disagreement measurable. Anyone can write or run Bitcoin software containing a different consensus rule, but a rule becomes economically meaningful only when miners, nodes, users and markets coordinate around it. BIP 110 demonstrated the limits of attempting to impose a consensus restriction without sufficient mining support.
The August split also completed a sequence already visible in the timeline. BIP 110 reached “Complete” status in June, became the center of a governance conflict in July, and finally attempted enforcement in August. The two-block minority branch showed the outcome more decisively than another round of developer debate could have done.