- Published on
This bitcoin miner rejected BIP-110 despite mining through a pool that supported it
- Authors
- Name
- DeepHorus
A bitcoin miner broke ranks with its own mining pool on Sunday by declining to support the controversial BIP-110 fork, instead producing block 961,634 on bitcoin's main chain. Simple Mining, a company that runs mining machines through the Ocean pool, used Ocean's DATUM protocol to make the independent choice. The decision highlighted the weak backing for BIP-110, which had only about 2.6% of hashrate support, far below the 55% threshold it needed to enforce a one-year restriction on non-financial data in transactions.
BIP-110, or Bitcoin Improvement Proposal-110, aims to stop people from storing pictures, text, and other non-financial data inside bitcoin transactions. Ocean, the pool Simple Mining mines with, had switched its miners to signal for BIP-110 by default in July and accounted for nearly all of the proposal's small mining support before the split. Simple Mining said it chose to go the other way because the proposal was not worth following.
"Hashrate is a vote you cannot fake, and we decided the proposal wasn't worth following," Simple Mining wrote on X. The company added that it used Ocean's DATUM protocol, which gives individual miners control over the blocks they produce. Normally, mining pools decide which transactions go into blocks and what software signals they carry, but DATUM moves that decision back to the individual miner.
This mechanism explains why Ocean appeared on both sides of the weekend split. A miner using Ocean produced the first block accepted by the BIP-110 branch on Saturday, according to fork tracker Mempool. Simple Mining then used the same pool and made the opposite choice, producing a block for the dominant bitcoin chain.
Computers running BIP-110 software began rejecting blocks that did not carry its signal at block 961,632, after miner support peaked at about 2.6%. The minority branch produced blocks 961,632 and 961,633 before stalling, while the main bitcoin chain continued producing blocks roughly every ten minutes. By Monday, a live monitor showed the main chain at 961,725, putting the BIP-110 branch more than 200 blocks behind.
The failed fork underscores the difficulty of gaining consensus for bitcoin protocol changes without broad hashrate support. Simple Mining's use of DATUM demonstrated how individual miners can exercise independent judgment even within a pool. The incident may encourage further development of protocols that give miners more autonomy over block content.
