The Bitcoin-derived blockchain is currently so lacking in miners that its correction mechanism will only activate in six years.
The blockchain that forked from Bitcoin on Saturday has not progressed since. It remains stuck at block 961,633, its second block. Bitcoin has since advanced to block 961,959, leaving the fork 326 blocks behind.
The split occurred due to a proposal called BIP-110, which would have banned the storage of images, text, and other non-payment data in Bitcoin transactions within a year. Changing Bitcoin's rules requires miner consensus, which miners signal by tagging the blocks they create. BIP-110 required 55% of blocks over two weeks. At its peak, it reached about 2.6%.
But instead of being adopted, the proposal had a secondary path built in. At block 961,632, computers running BIP-110 software began rejecting all blocks lacking this tag, regardless of the miners' decision.
Almost no blocks have this tag, so these computers rejected the blockchain being built by nearly all of Bitcoin's mining power and began following a blockchain consisting only of blocks that do have the tag.
The Bitcoin ledger consists of blockchains, each a bundle of transactions added by miners—companies operating warehouses of specialized computers that compete to create the next block. They are paid in newly issued bitcoins plus transaction fees, and a block arrives roughly every 10 minutes.
This 10-minute pace is not automatic. The network sets a difficulty level, which determines the amount of computational work a miner must perform to create a valid block, and recalculates it every 2016 blocks. If blocks arrive too quickly, the work becomes harder. If too slowly, it becomes easier.
At the normal rate, creating 2016 blocks takes about two weeks.
The longer the fork remains static, the further it falls behind. Source: Shaurya Malwa.
Two blocks were created on this blockchain. Then mining stopped because its cost is identical to Bitcoin mining—both blockchains inherited the same difficulty at the split, while the coin used as payment has no market, no exchange listings, and no buyers.
Furthermore, at current rates, mining cannot become easier unless 2016 blocks are initially created. Real-time monitoring currently estimates this timeframe at 6.3 years, compared to 350 days on Sunday.
This number is calculated based on the time of the last blocks created, so every hour of inactivity pushes it further out. Bitcoin's next difficulty adjustment is expected in 12 days.
"The BIP-110 experiment has essentially failed after creating just two blocks and falling behind the main blockchain," said Nick Ruck, Director of LVRG Research. "Bitcoin's security and progress remain tightly linked to the overwhelming majority of computational power, i.e., the total computing power miners use to run the network. Controversial rule changes without broad support from miners and the broader economy are doomed to stall as minority forks emerge, leaving the main network intact."
However, not everyone considers the matter settled.
end-content"I think it's too early to draw any firm conclusions from the initial block creation," said Himanshu Sahay, co-founder of Arch. "Changes to Bitcoin's rules depend on coordination among miners, developers, and the entire ecosystem, and while this divergence is worth watching, I would be cautious about calling it a failure at this stage."
