The proposal to change Bitcoin's code—BIP-110, which suggested a temporary ban on storing non-financial data on the network of the leading cryptocurrency—has effectively failed. After months of debates, developers attempted to launch a separate blockchain, which couldn't operate for even a day.
The failure of BIP-110 was due to critically low miner consensus, with less than 1% supporting the update. In other words, the remaining miners signaled they would continue mining the main Bitcoin without explanation.
However, this did not stop the initiative's developers from launching an alternative blockchain on August 8—a hard fork (modified copy of the code) of Bitcoin, i.e., a modified version of the leading cryptocurrency. This meant that some miners stopped mining Bitcoin and switched to mining new blocks containing BIP-110 changes.
However, because the new network used Bitcoin's mining difficulty, with an extremely low share of computing power, new blocks were mined at intervals of about 7 hours instead of the standard ten minutes. As a result, the network effectively ceased to function.
Michael Saylor, founder of the largest corporate Bitcoin holder—Strategy company, who previously opposed BIP-110, stated:
"Bitcoin worked exactly as intended. A fork of BIP-110 occurred, and network participants were free to choose which network to follow. As a result, about 99.85% of the network's power remained with Bitcoin."
This had no impact on Bitcoin's price. From August 7 to August 10, Bitcoin traded in a narrow range from $64.5k to $65.5k.
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