Why do Luke and others still want to fork Bitcoin when there is clearly no support? BIP-100 has already been declared a failure!

Author: Bitcoin Orange Trader

The support rate is only 2.53%, and BIP-110 has still forked Bitcoin: Can it succeed?

On August 8, two incompatible chains appeared on the Bitcoin network.

More unusually, the BIP-110 that drove this fork received only 51 blocks of signal support during the previous 2016-block cycle, with a support rate of just 2.53%. However, after the block height reached 961632, nodes running BIP-110 began to reject all blocks that did not signal bit 4 according to the predetermined rules.

Most miners did not support it and continued to mine under the original rules. A minority of nodes and miners executing BIP-110 remained on the other chain. As of 9:00 AM Beijing time on August 9, the main chain with higher cumulative work had reached 961654, while the BIP-110 executing chain was stuck at 961633, lagging by 21 blocks; none of the first 23 blocks of the new cycle on the main chain signaled for it.

This is not a balanced battle of hash power. The main chain is progressing normally, while the BIP-110 chain is clearly unable to keep up due to its low hash power.

Who is driving this fork?

BIP-110 was proposed by pseudonymous developer Dathon Ohm, with Luke Dashjr participating in the early drafts and technical suggestions. Its reference implementation is based on Bitcoin Knots maintained by Luke, which has not been merged into Bitcoin Core and has not received majority support from miners.

It did not enter the mainnet upgrade path of Bitcoin Core; the actual promoters are some Knots node operators and a few miners. This is a UASF attempt: even if miners do not reach sufficient signal support, nodes can still actively tighten their rules for accepting blocks, forcing the network to make a choice.

Why do these people insist on pushing BIP-110?

The background is the ongoing inscription controversy that has lasted for years.

Ordinals, BRC-20, and Runes write images, text, and token data into Bitcoin blocks. Supporters of these uses believe that block space is essentially a fee market; miners can package whatever they want if someone is willing to pay. Supporters of BIP-110 argue that Bitcoin should primarily be a currency and payment network, and that large amounts of arbitrary data will increase the blockchain's size, imposing long-term storage, bandwidth, validation, and propagation costs on all full nodes.

Data publishers only pay a fee once, but once the data enters a block, all global nodes must store it long-term. The publisher and miner complete a transaction, but the subsequent costs are left to the entire network. BIP-110 aims to transform this contradiction from a strategic issue of "whether nodes are willing to relay, whether mining pools are willing to package" into a consensus rule.

It plans to temporarily enforce this for about a year after activation. Most ordinary new output scripts cannot exceed 34 bytes, the OP_RETURN limit is 83 bytes, data pushes and some witness elements cannot exceed 256 bytes, while several potential Taproot constructs that could be used to carry data are disabled. Old UTXOs are exempt, and regular payment transactions are mostly unaffected.

Opponents are concerned not only about whether inscriptions can still be issued. BIP-110 turns some transaction uses from a fee market issue into a consensus judgment of valid or invalid, which could affect Miniscript, BitVM, and future protocols using Taproot. It also cannot completely eliminate on-chain data; users can still split data and change encoding, but it will be more costly and complex.

Why push so hard despite such low support?

Because supporters of BIP-110 do not believe that miner signals equal final votes. In the logic of UASF, nodes have the right to decide which blocks are valid; if enough users, wallets, exchanges, and payment services implement the new rules, miners will eventually follow to avoid mining blocks that no one accepts.

BIP-110 sets the miner lock-in threshold at 55%, lower than the common 95% of traditional BIP9. The more radical part comes later: even if the threshold is not met for a long time, from 961632 to 963647, it will still enter a mandatory signaling period. BIP-110 nodes will deem blocks that do not signal bit 4 as invalid, and their chain will enter a lock after 963648, then go through another 2016-block cycle, planning to officially enforce data restrictions at 965664.

It bets that nodes and economic entities will line up first, and hash power will be forced to follow. The current on-chain results show that this bet has not yet paid off. Most miners continue to expand the original chain, while nodes running BIP-110 can only wait on a low hash power branch for their blocks.

What is currently happening is merely a signaling rule fork. The data limits of 34, 83, and 256 bytes have not taken effect on the Bitcoin mainnet, and the BIP-110 chain has not even reached the formal locking and execution stage.

Is it still possible for it to succeed?

This can be viewed as two separate issues.

As long as there are miners willing to mine, the BIP-110 chain can continue to exist and eventually activate the rules at its own chain height. However, to become the economically meaningful Bitcoin main chain, it still requires sustained hash power, as well as recognition from exchanges, wallets, custodial platforms, Lightning services, and holders. Nodes can reject main chain blocks, but they cannot solely rely on rejection to have others acknowledge their chain.

Time is also a hard threshold in front of it. The BIP-110 chain inherited the mining difficulty of the mainnet when it forked; Bitcoin adjusts its difficulty only every 2016 blocks, with a maximum reduction of 4 times per adjustment. If we roughly estimate the executing chain's hash power based on the previous 2.53% signal rate, it may take about 553 days to complete the first cycle; after the difficulty reduction, it may take another approximately 138 days to reach formal activation, totaling nearly 690 days, or about 1.9 years.

This number is not a definite date. The time can be significantly shortened with the addition of new hash power. But it indicates that even if BIP-110 can activate on its own chain, it may first experience a very long low-speed period. The waiting time before activation may even exceed the planned execution time of about one year.

Ordinary holders do not need to understand this as "the Bitcoin rules have changed."

The main chain with the highest cumulative work is still operating under the original rules, with the 21 million cap, existing balances, and daily payments unchanged. The risks are mainly concentrated on nodes, wallets, and service providers using the BIP-110 backend: the two chains see different confirmation states, and this fork does not have dedicated replay protection, meaning the same ordinary transaction may be valid on both sides.

The current result: BIP-110 has not activated on the Bitcoin mainnet; it has instead created a low hash power executing chain.