Bitcoin’s BIP-110 Fork Needs Four Difficulty Resets to Recover, Not One

The breakaway Bitcoin chain created by BIP-110 is widely described as six years away from fixing its own mining difficulty. That figure covers only the first adjustment. Bitcoin caps a downward reset at four times, so on the numbers the chain is producing now it would need four of them in succession, pushing a return to normal block production out to just over eight years.

A chain that has not moved since Saturday

The BIP-110 chain has produced two blocks in its entire existence. Both arrived on 8 August, both were mined by a pseudonymous group called Roughnecks using Ocean’s DATUM protocol, and nothing has followed them.

Bitcoin, meanwhile, has carried on. A direct check of the main chain’s tip at 14:00 UTC on 11 August returned block 961,992, which put the fork 359 blocks behind. CoinDesk had reported a gap of 326 earlier that morning; Bitcoin Magazine counted 111 on 9 August. The distance is growing by roughly a block every ten minutes, and none of that growth comes from the fork.

The split itself was never a close-run thing. BIP-110, formally the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, asked miners to signal support on version bit 4 and needed 1,109 of 2,016 blocks, or 55 percent, according to the specification in the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals repository. It got 51 blocks. That is 2.53 percent, and Bitcoin Magazine reported the figure on 10 August.

What produced a chain split anyway was the proposal’s fallback. Its mandatory signaling window runs from block 961,632 to 963,647, and inside that window nodes running BIP-110 reject any block that fails to signal. On 8 August they duly rejected the block the rest of the network had just built, and started their own.

The six-year figure is the optimistic reading

Both chains inherited the same mining difficulty when they parted, which is the whole problem. Producing a BIP-110 block costs exactly what producing a Bitcoin block costs, and it pays in a coin with no exchange listing, no market price and no buyer. There is no economic reason for anyone to mine it.

Difficulty only resets after a chain completes 2,016 blocks. The fork has completed two of them, leaving 2,014 to go, and a live monitor cited by CoinDesk put that milestone 6.3 years away on 11 August, up from an estimate of 350 days two days earlier.

Work backwards from 6.3 years and the assumption becomes visible. Spreading 2,014 blocks across that span means one block roughly every 27 hours, which implies the chain holds about 0.6 percent of Bitcoin’s hashrate. That is around a quarter of the 2.53 percent that signaled for the proposal in the first place.

How long the first reset takes, at different levels of support

Share of Bitcoin hashrate	Average block	Time to first reset
2.53% (all who signaled)	6.6 hours	1.5 years
1.00%	16.7 hours	3.8 years
0.61% (implied by the 6.3-year estimate)	27.4 hours	6.3 years
0.25%	66.7 hours	15.3 years

Bitcoin will not let difficulty fall fast enough

Here is what the published estimate leaves out. Reaching that first reset does not restore normal block production, because Bitcoin limits how far difficulty can move in one step. A single adjustment can cut difficulty by a factor of four at most, in either direction. The rule has been in the protocol since the beginning and exists precisely to stop a chain swinging wildly after a hashrate shock.

A chain running on 0.6 percent of Bitcoin’s hashpower needs difficulty to fall by a factor of about 165 before blocks arrive every ten minutes again. Four is not 165. At four times per reset, the chain needs four consecutive 2,016-block periods to get there, and it has to mine every block of every one of them.

The first period is the punishing one, at 6.3 years. After that first cut, blocks land about every seven hours and the second period takes roughly 1.6 years. The third takes about five months, the fourth about six weeks. Added together the chain reaches ordinary block times a little past the eight-year mark, and only if the handful of miners still on it never leave.

It cannot reach its own activation height

The arithmetic creates an awkward outcome for the proposal itself. BIP-110 was written to guarantee activation: the specification locks the rules in at block 963,648 and switches them on at block 965,664, a height that falls around 1 September 2026 on a normally functioning chain.

Those are heights, not dates. The enforcing chain sits at 961,633, which leaves it 2,015 blocks short of lock-in and 4,031 blocks short of the point where its restrictions would actually bind. The rules that the entire exercise was built to impose cannot take effect on the chain enforcing them until well into the 2030s.

How we calculated this

The block heights come from the BIP-110 specification and from a direct query of Bitcoin’s tip height on 11 August. The 0.61 percent hashrate share is derived by reversing the published 6.3-year estimate across the 2,014 blocks the chain still owes, rather than measured directly, since the chain has produced no blocks from which to measure. The four-times limit on a downward difficulty adjustment is a consensus rule, not an assumption. Every figure above holds only while hashrate stays where it is; a single large pool redirecting to the fork would shorten all of it, and the miners walking away would extend it.

The people who called it, and the people urging patience

Michael Saylor and Blockstream chief executive Adam Back had both objected before the split, aiming at the activation method rather than the goal. Strategy published a point-by-point critique arguing that dropping the threshold from the customary 95 percent to 55 percent lowered the bar for a contested change, and that mandatory signaling rewrites what it means for a miner to simply not vote. Saylor’s verdict on 9 August was that Bitcoin had worked as designed, with 99.85 percent of hashpower staying put.

Nick Ruck, director of LVRG Research, told CoinDesk the experiment “has effectively collapsed after producing only two blocks and falling behind the main chain,” and said contested rule changes lacking broad backing are “destined to stall as minority forks.”

That reading is not universal. Himanshu Sahay, co-founder of Arch, told CoinDesk it is “still too early to draw any firm conclusions from the initial block production,” noting that rule changes depend on coordination across miners, developers and the wider ecosystem, and that he would “be cautious about describing it as a failure at this stage.” Luke Dashjr, among the proposal’s backers, has called the slow blocks tolerable and told Bitcoin Knots users to upgrade. A chain that has stopped producing blocks is not the same thing as a chain anyone has formally abandoned.

Some miners were pointed at the fork without meaning to be

The only party out of pocket so far is the miners. Ocean, whose team backed the proposal, told clients that some of those using its Stratum templates may have thought they were mining Bitcoin while their hashrate was going to the BIP-110 chain instead. The company said it would reimburse them for what they would have earned on the main chain over that window. Anyone who mined through Ocean templates on 8 and 9 August should confirm which chain their shares were credited against rather than assume the payout came through as normal.

What to watch

A third block would change the picture faster than anything else, because every figure here rests on a hashrate estimate that a single pool could overturn overnight. Failing that, the next marker is 1 September 2026, when block 965,664 passes on the main chain and BIP-110’s activation deadline expires in practical terms while the enforcing chain sits thousands of blocks below it.

The last variable is whether any exchange lists the forked coin. Nothing about the arithmetic changes until mining it pays something, and right now it pays nothing at all.

Note: This article reports on a protocol dispute and the block data behind it. The forked coin has no exchange listing and no market price, and mining it currently produces no realisable revenue. The projections above are calculations based on stated assumptions, not forecasts, and nothing here is investment or mining advice. Miners who used Ocean templates on 8 and 9 August should verify their own payout records directly.

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