The BIP-110 fork produced exactly two blocks. Eight hours. That is not a fork; it is a footnote. At block 961,632, a set of Bitcoin nodes enforcing a user-activated soft fork (UASF) began rejecting blocks that did not signal support for BIP-110. The result was a chain split that, by block 961,633, had already stalled. The main chain continued to 961,681 and beyond. Two blocks—that is the data point that frames this entire analysis. Probability does not forgive edge cases, and this edge case was a governance failure dressed in code.
To understand what happened, one must strip away the narrative layers. BIP-110—Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110—was a protocol-level change aimed at restricting non-financial data in Bitcoin transactions. Its target was clear: the Ordinals protocol and the BRC-20 token standard that had been inscribing data onto satoshis since early 2023. The proposal required that at least 55% of blocks in a difficulty adjustment period signal support before activation. In the previous epoch, only 51 out of 2,016 blocks—2.53%—had signaled. The threshold was absurdly distant. Yet the proponents decided to activate anyway via a UASF, a mechanism where nodes enforce new rules regardless of miner signaling. The fork was triggered at block 961,632, and the network split.
Context
Bitcoin’s governance is a multi-layered beast. The BIP process is the formal channel for proposing changes, but the real power lies in miner adoption and economic consensus. Historically, successful forks like Bitcoin Cash (2017) had massive miner support, exchange backing, and community momentum. BIP-110 had none of that. It was a fringe proposal driven by a philosophical faction that views Bitcoin strictly as a monetary network—any non-financial use of block space is considered rent extraction. Ordinals, which allow data embedding via witness data, were seen as an attack on Bitcoin’s purity. The response was a technical attempt to ban them at the protocol level.
But the proposal failed to account for the most basic law of blockchain governance: Code executes exactly as written, not as intended. The UASF activation was written as a hard rejection of non-signaling blocks. The intention was to force a new consensus. The execution produced a chain with negligible hashpower. The fork chain’s security model was broken from the first block. With only a handful of miners—likely individual operators or small pools—the chain was vulnerable to reorganization, double-spends, and irrelevance. In my experience leading the 2023 Solana transaction replay analysis, I saw how a design favoring large validators could create centralization vectors. Here, the centralization was not in the design but in the outcome: the fork chain’s hashpower was so low that it was effectively a single point of failure.
Core: Systematic Teardown
Let me dissect this systematically. The first dimension is hashpower. Bitcoin’s main chain operates at approximately 500 exahashes per second (EH/s). A block is produced every 10 minutes on average. In eight hours, the expected number of blocks is 48. The BIP-110 fork chain produced 2. That gives an implied hashpower ratio of roughly 4% of the main chain. But that is generous—the fork chain’s difficulty was likely still based on the main chain’s, so actual hashpower could be even lower. With such minimal security, the fork chain is a ghost. Any transaction on it can be reversed by a single entity with a modest amount of hashpower. The probability of a successful double-spend is near 100% if someone cared to attempt it.
Second, the incentive structure. Miners are rational actors. Ordinals-related transactions have provided a significant boost to Bitcoin fee revenue. During the peak of the inscription craze, fees from Ordinals constituted over 20% of total miner revenue in some periods. BIP-110 would have eliminated that revenue stream. Why would miners support a proposal that cuts their income? They did not. The 2.53% signaling rate was not a coincidence; it was a rational economic response. Logic is binary; incentives are fractal. The proposal’s failure was not a technical bug but a misalignment of incentives. The proponents assumed that ideological purity would override profit. It did not.
Third, the governance mechanism. UASF is a controversial tool. It is meant to be a last resort when miners are blocking necessary upgrades. But in this case, the upgrade was not necessary—it was a value judgment. The UASF activation was a violation of the informal social contract that changes require broad consensus. The Bitcoin community has a long memory; the 2017 SegWit activation succeeded because it had overwhelming support from exchanges, users, and eventually miners. BIP-110 had none of that. The fork was a test of whether a minority can force a change. The answer was a clear no. The main chain ignored the fork, and the fork chain died.
Fourth, the technical risk. The fork chain’s two blocks exist on a separate timeline. If any exchange mistakenly lists the BIP-110 chain’s tokens (a “forked BTC”), it would be a disaster. The tokens have no economic value—they are backed by negligible hashpower and no user base. The risk of a misleading listing is low but non-zero. In my 2024 Bitcoin ETF whitepaper critique, I found that institutional marketing often diverges from operational reality. Similarly, some exchanges might be tempted to list the fork for speculative trading, but the liquidity would be a mirage. The chain is dead; its tokens are worthless.
Now, let me layer in the data. The block height difference: main chain at 961,681, fork chain at 961,633—a gap of 48 blocks, exactly the expected number over 8 hours. The fork chain did not produce a single additional block after 8 hours. That is consistent with a complete abandonment. The last block on the fork chain was mined by a miner who likely did not intend to continue. The fork chain’s difficulty adjusted? No, it was still using the main chain’s difficulty, so the next block would require the same work. Without a difficulty reset, the chain would need substantial hashpower to ever catch up. It will never get that.
From a tokenomics perspective, BIP-110 was a direct attack on the value proposition of Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens. These assets derive their existence from Bitcoin’s block space. If the protocol banned data inscriptions, the entire ecosystem would collapse. The fork’s failure thus provided a temporary reprieve for Ordinals investors. But the underlying tension remains. The Bitcoin block space is a finite resource, and its allocation is a political question. The market has spoken: miners prefer fees over purity. But the philosophical debate is far from over.
Contrarian Angle
Here is the counter-intuitive part: the BIP-110 proponents were not entirely wrong. Bitcoin’s block space is indeed scarce, and the explosion of data inscriptions has led to higher fees for ordinary transactions. During the height of the Ordinals craze, average transaction fees spiked to over $30, pricing out small users. The argument that Bitcoin should remain a settlement layer for value transfer, not a data storage medium, has merit. The problem is the solution. BIP-110 attempted to impose a top-down restriction, ignoring the economic reality that miners have the final say. The failure of the fork actually reinforces the market-based approach: let fees determine what gets included. If users want to inscribe data, they pay for it. If they cannot afford it, the market adjusts.
What the bulls (the Ordinals community) got right is that the network effect of Bitcoin is stronger than any single proposal. The social consensus around the main chain is so robust that a fringe fork cannot disrupt it. The bulls also understood that miners are not ideological; they follow the money. Ordinals generates fees; miners will protect that revenue stream. The contrarian insight is that the BIP-110 failure is a healthy signal for Bitcoin’s governance. It shows that no single group can hijack the protocol without broad support. This is a feature, not a bug.
Moreover, the failure may have a long-term positive effect: it clarifies the governance boundaries. Future proposals that try to restrict data usage will need to align with miner incentives. That might mean proposals that internalize the cost of data through higher fees rather than banning it outright. Or it might mean proposals that create a separate fee market for data. The key lesson is that top-down bans are ineffective in a decentralized system. The market will route around them.
Takeaway
The BIP-110 fork is a two-block footnote in Bitcoin’s history, but it is a powerful one. It exposed the gap between code and consensus, between intention and execution. The proposal failed not because of a bug in the code, but because the code did not account for the economic reality of miners. Certainty is a luxury; risk is the baseline. The risk that a minority could force a change was real, but the system self-corrected. The future of Bitcoin’s block space will be determined by the intersection of technology, incentives, and governance. The BIP-110 episode is a case study in how not to propose a change. It is also a case study in how Bitcoin’s governance actually works: messy, decentralized, and ultimately resilient. The next proposal will learn from this—or it will suffer the same fate. The question is not whether data will be allowed on Bitcoin, but who pays for it and how much. The market will decide. That is the only invariant that matters.
