BIP-110 is dead: what Bitcoin’s failed anti-spam fork reveals about governance in 2026

The minority chain mined two blocks in eight hours, then froze. With 99.85% of hashpower on the original chain, the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork is the most decisive governance rejection since SegWit2x. Its backers are now talking about replacing the miners entirely. Summary BIP-110, the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, triggered a chain split at block 961,632 on August 8, 2026. The minority chain produced two blocks in eight hours, then stalled, while the main network continued at its normal pace and pulled dozens of blocks ahead. Only 2.53% of blocks signaled support during the mandatory window, far below the 55% threshold the proposal itself set for activation. Roughly 99.85% of Bitcoin’s hashpower stayed with the original chain. Michael Saylor published a 110 point essay opposing the proposal, calling it “extremely dangerous” and arguing that rejecting valid, fee paying transactions sets a precedent that could be used to censor any class of Bitcoin activity in the future. The fork exposed holders to replay attack risk because BIP-110 included no replay protection, meaning a transaction broadcast on one chain could be valid on both, potentially causing unintended fund transfers. BIP-110 backers have announced plans to resume mining the stalled chain and switch the proof of work algorithm to bypass the miners who rejected them, a move that would create a functionally separate cryptocurrency. Bitcoin’s latest governance crisis lasted about eight hours. On the morning of August 8, 2026, nodes running the BIP-110 soft fork rejected a block at height 961,632 that lacked the required signaling flag and began building an alternate chain. That chain produced exactly two blocks. Then it stopped. The main Bitcoin network kept moving at its usual ten minute pace, indifferent. By the time most American traders checked their phones on Saturday morning, the split was already over in every practical sense. The BIP-110 branch had inherited the full network difficulty with almost none of the hashrate, meaning its next difficulty adjustment was estimated at roughly 350 days away. Two blocks in eight hours, then silence. What makes BIP-110 worth examining is not its failure. Plenty of proposals fail. It is what the failure reveals about how Bitcoin governance actually works in 2026, and what happens when a faction decides the governance system itself is the problem. What BIP-110 proposed The Reduced Data Temporary Softfork was designed to restrict arbitrary non-financial data embedded in Bitcoin transactions. Seven rules would have capped most new outputs at 34 bytes, OP_RETURN at 83 bytes, and data pushes at 256 bytes. The restrictions were temporary, expiring after 52,416 blocks, roughly one year. The target was explicit: Ordinals inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, Runes, and large Taproot data payloads.