Bitcoin anti-spam fork stalls at 2.53%

A group of Bitcoin miners and node operators split off from the main chain on Saturday at block 961,632 to launch a rival version of Bitcoin built around BIP-110, a proposal meant to filter out non-financial "spam" transactions like inscriptions and ordinals. The breakaway chain mined exactly two blocks in about eight hours, then stopped producing new ones entirely.

The hash rate math didn't work

The fork drew just 2.53% of Bitcoin's total mining support, according to Decrypt. At that share, the chain's two blocks landed hours apart instead of the roughly ten minutes Bitcoin targets, because block time is a direct function of hash power relative to difficulty. Worse, the new chain inherited its difficulty setting from the original network at the moment of the split, meaning it won't see a downward adjustment for close to 350 days under Bitcoin's standard 2,016-block retargeting window. Meanwhile the main Bitcoin network kept producing blocks on schedule, unaffected by the defection.

That gap is the whole story in one number. A chain needs enough miners pointing hash rate at it to keep blocks coming at a usable pace. Get below a low single-digit percentage of the parent network's power, and the arithmetic turns brutal: blocks get rarer, transactions back up, and the difficulty won't budge to fix it for the better part of a year. Two blocks and a stall is what that arithmetic looks like in practice.

A fork without followers isn't a fork, it's a stunt

The read here isn't complicated. BIP-110 forks have surfaced before as a way to push back against the growth of non-monetary data on Bitcoin's blockchain, the ordinals and inscriptions that some node operators see as clutter competing for block space. The idea has real technical backing among a faction of developers. What it doesn't have is miners.

Mining is the only vote that counts in a proof-of-work fork, and 2.53% is a rejection, not a foothold. Compare it to Bitcoin Cash's 2017 split, which launched with enough hash power to sustain regular blocks from day one even as it bled market share afterward. This fork couldn't clear that first bar. Node operators and users can run whatever software they want, but without miners securing blocks at a workable cadence, a chain is a ledger nobody can transact on. The chain exists on paper. It doesn't function as money.

The deeper point is about what actually governs Bitcoin's contents. Anyone frustrated by inscriptions taking up block space has a philosophical argument, but changing the base protocol requires either near-universal miner buy-in for a hard fork, which this clearly lacked, or a soft-fork path that doesn't split the chain at all. A vocal minority forking off and hoping the market follows has been tried multiple times against Bitcoin specifically, and it keeps failing for the same structural reason: liquidity, exchange listings and price discovery all sit with the original chain, so a low-hash-rate fork has no way to bootstrap value that would attract more miners back to it. It's a chicken-and-egg problem the fork never got past.

What would change the picture

Watch whether any exchange or wallet lists the forked token and whether hash rate on the breakaway chain ticks up from here. If neither happens within a few weeks, this fork joins the list of Bitcoin splits that generated headlines and nothing else. A rebound to something like 15-20% of network hash rate, or a major venue offering trading, would be the signal that BIP-110 has real backing beyond the developers who wrote it.