Bitcoin BIP-110 fork stalls at two blocks as Simple Mining stays on main chain

Bitcoin's BIP-110 enforcing branch remains stalled after producing only two blocks, but miner Roughnecks says it plans to resume mining the minority chain despite weak economics and collapsing support. The BIP-110 branch has gone 37 hours without a new block, signaling hashpower backing the fork has dropped from more than 15 EH/s to 1.16 EH/s, and the chain now trails Bitcoin's original network by about 250 blocks. Roughnecks had previously said on Saturday that it was suspending operations, but it has now said it will keep mining until BIP-110 can implement a proof-of-work change. That change would permanently separate the BIP-110 branch from Bitcoin's existing proof-of-work network, effectively creating a new coin rather than continuing to compete with Bitcoin miners under the same mining algorithm. The fork began at block 961,632, when nodes enforcing BIP-110 started rejecting blocks that did not signal support. The proposal, formally called the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, would temporarily restrict non-financial data in Bitcoin transactions by capping most new outputs at 34 bytes, limiting OP_RETURN to 83 bytes and restricting data pushes to 256 bytes. Supporters say the rules are aimed at Ordinals inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens and similar uses, while ordinary bitcoin payments and Lightning Network transfers were intended to continue working. Support for BIP-110 never approached its 55% miner-signaling target, and the minority chain inherited Bitcoin's existing mining difficulty while attracting only a fraction of the network's hashpower. That has left blocks arriving far too slowly for the branch to be economically viable under current conditions. The split has revived broader arguments over Bitcoin block-space policy, activation methods and replay risk, and Roughnecks' latest stance suggests some supporters are now focused less on winning over Bitcoin's existing network and more on preserving the branch long enough to launch a separate proof-of-work chain.