When Bitcoin split at block 961632 in August, a new chain emerged from the contentious BIP-110 proposal. Rather than gaining traction, the fork has languished in near-total obscurity. The Roughnecks mining pool, one of few operators directing resources toward the alternative chain, has managed to produce merely four blocks over the span of a week—a telling indicator of how little computational power supports this vision compared to the dominant consensus.
The technical challenge facing BIP-110 extends beyond simple network effects. The chain suffers from acute illiquidity, with almost no trading infrastructure or exchange support. Without miners, the network remains vulnerable. Without liquidity, it cannot attract either speculators or genuine adopters seeking to transfer value. This chicken-and-egg dynamic has plagued numerous Bitcoin forks, from Bitcoin Cash to countless others that promised innovation but lacked the economic incentives to bootstrap sustained participation.
Facing these headwinds, BIP-110 advocates are now considering a more drastic intervention: abandoning Bitcoin's double SHA-256 hashing function in favor of Blake2b, a cryptographic primitive used by only a narrow set of cryptocurrency projects. This represents both technical desperation and strategic miscalculation. While Blake2b offers legitimate computational advantages in certain contexts, switching algorithms would sever the fork even further from Bitcoin's installed infrastructure, miner expertise, and hardware optimization. It would effectively transform the chain into an unrelated cryptocurrency that merely borrowed Bitcoin's historical ledger.
The proposal reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of why forks succeed or fail. Bitcoin's security model depends on vast hashing power committed to a specific algorithm. Attempting to rebrand through cryptographic primitives cannot manufacture legitimacy or hash power. Successful forks like Bitcoin Cash maintained algorithmic continuity while differentiating through policy and community consensus. Abandoning that approach suggests the BIP-110 coalition lacks confidence in its own value proposition and may be grasping for technical differentiation as a substitute for economic viability. As the fork contemplates this pivot, it faces a critical question: whether a radical overhaul might accelerate adoption or merely accelerate irrelevance.