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Bitcoin’s latest governance fight ended fast. BIP-110, a proposal to restrict certain data on the network, tried to activate over the weekend and produced exactly two blocks before the chain stalled completely.
The fork needed 55% miner signaling to move forward. It never got close. At block 961,632, support peaked at just a few percentage points — nowhere near the threshold. The chain split from the main network anyway, briefly, then basically stopped moving. Two blocks. That’s it. The minority chain now sits frozen, carrying almost no computational weight, facing the same difficulty settings as the dominant network it broke away from.
Not a great look.
Saylor, Bailey, and the Fallout
Michael Saylor put a number on it pretty quickly. He said 99.85% of Bitcoin’s hashpower stayed on the dominant chain. And he estimated the minority branch would need 25 years to work through its current difficulty adjustment — a figure that, if accurate, makes the BIP-110 chain essentially non-functional for the foreseeable future. Twenty-five years is not a roadmap. It’s a death sentence.
David Bailey went further, calling BIP-110 the least popular soft fork in Bitcoin’s history and urging the proposal’s backers to sit with that failure and actually think about what it means. He didn’t mince it.
And then there’s the Luke Dashjr situation, which is its own separate mess. Mark “Murch” Erhardt filed a GitHub pull request to remove Dashjr from his role as a BIP editor, citing what Erhardt described as inconsistent behavior in how Dashjr pushed for BIP-110. Several developers have backed the pull request. But the process for actually removing a BIP editor? Unclear. Nobody seems to have a clean answer on that, which is kind of the point — decentralized governance is messy, and this is a textbook example of why.
Dashjr, for his part, says he followed established processes the whole time. He’s pushing back hard on the removal effort and has suggested Murch should be the one removed instead. So that’s where that stands.
Roughnecks Plan to Keep Mining
BIP-110 isn’t completely dead yet, at least not according to its supporters. Dathon Ohm, the proposal’s author, and Dashjr are both advocating for a proof-of-work change — a shift in the underlying algorithm that would, in theory, cut the legs out from under the large mining pools they’re accusing of collusion. Their argument is that the fork didn’t fail because the idea was bad. It failed because big pools coordinated to kill it.
The Roughnecks, the mining group that produced those two BIP-110 blocks, announced they’re resuming operations. They had paused earlier, calling the effort wasteful under the current proof-of-work setup. Now they’re back. Their position is that miners on the primary chain effectively isolated themselves by refusing to signal for BIP-110 — not the other way around.
Whether that framing gains any traction is probably the key question right now.
A proof-of-work change would be a genuinely radical move. It wouldn’t just tweak Bitcoin’s rules at the margins. It would require building out entirely new infrastructure — new miners, new exchanges willing to list an alternative chain, a new user base willing to follow. That’s a massive coordination problem, and the Roughnecks are starting from a position of minimal hashpower against a dominant network that has already moved on.
But they’re not stopping. And Ohm and Dashjr seem committed to pressing the case.
What’s Actually at Stake Here
The BIP-110 fight is really a fight about who controls Bitcoin’s direction. Large mining pools have enormous influence over which proposals activate and which ones die. BIP-110 supporters say that influence has become a kind of veto power — that pools can simply refuse to signal and kill any change they don’t like, regardless of whether the broader developer community wants it.
That’s a governance problem that goes well beyond this one proposal. Bitcoin has faced similar tensions before, and the pattern is familiar: a faction pushes a change, the mining majority blocks it, the minority faction either fades or tries to fork off. What’s different here is the explicit call for a proof-of-work algorithm change as a response. That’s not a soft fork tweak. That’s a declaration of war on the existing mining establishment.
The Dashjr removal debate runs parallel to all of this and probably won’t resolve cleanly. There’s no formal, well-documented procedure for removing a BIP editor, and the GitHub pull request, however much support it picks up, can’t force anything in a system that runs on rough consensus. Dashjr knows that. His counter-proposal to remove Murch instead seems designed partly to make that exact point.
So the BIP-110 chain sits at two blocks. The Roughnecks say they’re mining again. Ohm and Dashjr are pushing the proof-of-work change argument. And 99.85% of Bitcoin’s hashpower is somewhere else entirely, not paying much attention.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is BIP-110 and why did it fail?
BIP-110 is a Bitcoin proposal to restrict certain data on the network. It failed to reach the required 55% miner signaling threshold, peaking at only a few percentage points at block 961,632, resulting in a stalled minority chain with just two blocks mined.
Who are the Roughnecks and what are they doing now?
The Roughnecks are the mining group that produced the two BIP-110 blocks. After pausing operations, they announced they would resume mining on the minority chain and are pushing for a proof-of-work algorithm change to counter large mining pools.
