The latest attempt to fork Bitcoin’s blockchain over the embedment of non-financial data has failed to gain meaningful traction. According to a market update from WuBlockchain, the BIP-110 minority chain holds just 0.15% of total hashpower, with only two blocks mined since the split. The rest of the network – roughly 99.85% of hashing power – remains firmly on the main chain.
The fork’s stated aim was to temporarily restrict data like Ordinal inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, and other non-financial transactions that some Bitcoiners see as spam. But miners overwhelmingly ignored the proposal, leaving the BIP-110 chain more than 80 blocks behind the main tip and without any realistic path to survival.
A Fork with No Practical Tailwind
Michael Saylor, the executive chairman of MicroStrategy and a prominent Bitcoin advocate, noted that the fork’s hashpower deficit is so extreme that, at its current block production rate, it could take roughly 25 years to reach its first difficulty adjustment. That estimate highlights how futile the effort has become: difficulty adjustments are designed to keep block times near 10 minutes, but with only 0.15% of global hashpower, the BIP-110 chain’s block intervals are orders of magnitude longer.
The fork’s chronic block deficit means transaction finality on that chain is essentially non-existent. Exchanges, wallet providers, and custodians have no incentive to support a network that cannot clear transactions reliably – a factor that usually determines whether a minority fork can attract any economic activity at all.
Miners Vote with Their ASICs
Bitcoin’s consensus model has always given miners the final say on protocol changes, and the BIP-110 outcome reinforces how difficult it is to push through a contentious rule alteration. In this case, miners showed no appetite for censoring so-called non-financial data, which has generated significant fee revenue during periods of high Ordinals and BRC-20 activity. The economic incentive to process all valid transactions simply outweighed ideological arguments about network purity.
While the U.S. legislative landscape is grappling with its own pressure points over crypto regulations, as seen with the recent fight over a major crypto bill, Bitcoin’s protocol remains a creature of its distributed hashpower. Forks that ignore miner economics rarely attract enough support to become viable chains, and BIP-110 becomes the latest example of that reality.
What This Means for Bitcoin’s Governance
The negligible hashpower on the BIP-110 chain underscores a long-running tension: Bitcoin’s base layer is conservative by design. Any attempt to change its rules – even temporarily – faces an uphill battle unless it garners overwhelming consensus from miners and node operators. The BIP-110 effort, supported by a small minority that views embedded data as harmful, failed to achieve that critical mass.
Yet the debate over block space usage is not going away. Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens continue to occupy block space, raising fees and occasionally pushing smaller transactions out of the mempool. Proposals to limit non-financial data will likely resurface in different forms, but the BIP-110 fork shows that a hard-fork route is a dead end barring a complete shift in miner sentiment.
For now, the main chain remains the only economically relevant version of Bitcoin. The BIP-110 chain’s 0.15% hashpower will likely dwindle further as miners have little reason to dedicate resources to a chain that cannot catch up and offers no block rewards of value. The episode serves as a stark reminder that Bitcoin’s greatest strength – its difficulty to change – also makes miner-led forks a nearly impossible path to reform.
