Bitcoin's latest culture war just produced a chain split nobody wanted, as the anti-Ordinals soft fork activated with almost no miner support
At block height 961,632, nodes running BIP-110, the controversial proposal to restrict arbitrary data storage on Bitcoin, began enforcing mandatory signaling rules. When the first block at that height arrived without the required version bit 4 signal, those nodes rejected it and split off from the main Bitcoin chain.
BIP-110, formally titled “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork,” was designed to limit the size of arbitrary data fields in Bitcoin transactions. Its primary target was data storage techniques powering projects like Ordinals and Runes. The proposal, authored by Dathon Ohm with input from longtime Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr, called for a User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) requiring 55% miner support to lock in. That threshold was never remotely close to being met.
Miner signaling for BIP-110 has fluctuated between 0.3% and 2.6% in recent periods. No major mining pool publicly expressed support for the proposal. Nodes running the enforcement rules, primarily those using Bitcoin Knots software, promptly rejected the non-signaling block and effectively isolated themselves from the rest of the network.
The data restrictions themselves were designed to activate at block height 965,664, roughly four weeks after the signaling window opened, assuming the 55% threshold was met during that window. If locked in, the restrictions would have applied for approximately one year, covering around 52,416 blocks.
Michael Saylor, the executive chairman of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) and one of Bitcoin’s most prominent corporate advocates, has been among the vocal critics of BIP-110. Saylor has characterized the proposal as having already failed, predicting that any resulting fork would become economically insignificant.
Without meaningful hash rate, blocks would be produced at an agonizingly slow pace, if at all. Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment mechanism assumes a certain amount of mining power. When that power drops to near zero on a minority chain, block times can stretch from the target 10 minutes to hours or even days.
This isn’t like the Bitcoin Cash fork of 2017, which launched with substantial mining support and exchange listings on day one. BIP-110’s fork arrived with single-digit percentage miner interest and no exchange infrastructure waiting to receive it.
For operators running Bitcoin Knots nodes with BIP-110 enforcement enabled, the practical consequence is that their nodes are now out of sync with the Bitcoin network. They’ll need to either disable the enforcement rules and resync with the main chain or continue operating on what amounts to a ghost network.
