A breakaway bitcoin chain launched on Aug. 8 has mined two blocks. In the same period, the network it split from has mined more than three hundred.
The fork followed mandatory signaling for BIP-110, a contested consensus change that failed to attract meaningful support among miners. When the split occurred, the new chain inherited bitcoin''s difficulty target — the measure of how much work a block requires — while attracting only a sliver of the hashrate needed to satisfy it.
The result is a chain where blocks that should take ten minutes take hours or days, and where the difficulty adjustment that would fix the problem cannot arrive until enough blocks are mined to trigger it. On current throughput, that recalibration is years away.
One mining pool briefly supported the change by default, but individual operators using custom software opted out, which drained what hashrate the fork had before it began.
Bitcoin has run this experiment before. The 2017 split that produced Bitcoin Cash arrived with an emergency difficulty adjustment precisely because its designers understood this failure mode; this fork did not include one.
The episode is a reminder of how bitcoin''s governance actually resolves. Nobody vetoed the change. Miners simply declined to point machines at it, and a chain without hashrate is a database nobody is defending.