Overview
- The chain split began at block 961,632 on Aug. 8 when nodes enforcing BIP-110 started rejecting non-signaling blocks and followed an alternative block that miners using OCEAN produced.
- Miner support was far below the proposal’s 55% threshold, with only 51 of 2,016 blocks signaling for BIP-110 (about 2.53%) in the prior period.
- The enforcing branch mined just two blocks (961,632–961,633) and then stalled while the main Bitcoin chain continued normally, leaving the minority fork more than 100 blocks behind in accumulated work.
- The minority branch inherited Bitcoin’s current mining difficulty but controls negligible hashpower, which has pushed block times to many hours and led monitors to estimate the next difficulty adjustment could take on the order of hundreds of days at the observed pace.
- BIP-110 does not add automatic replay protection, Bitcoin Core has not adopted the change, Bitcoin Knots added safeguards, exchanges report normal service, and supporters have draft proof-of-work fallback code but no activation schedule.