A bitcoin fork meant to filter out spam transactions is running on fumes. It has drawn only 2.53% of mining support, and blocks on the breakaway chain are landing hours apart. The main bitcoin network, meanwhile, has kept churning along without any disruption.
Weak support from the start
The numbers are stark. Just 2.53% of miners have thrown in with the fork, a figure that leaves it far short of the hash power needed to produce blocks at a normal clip. Right now, blocks are arriving hours apart, which makes the chain practically unusable for transactions. A block every few hours isn't a ledger; it's a slow drip.
A long wait for a rebalance
Bitcoin's difficulty adjusts every 2,016 blocks, and the fork is roughly 350 days away from that point. At the current pace, that's a very long time to wait. Until then, the chain stays in this sluggish state, with no automatic correction to speed things up. The fork could grind on like this for months, producing blocks at a trickle.
Main network unaffected
For the rest of bitcoin, nothing changed. The main chain continued operating normally, confirming that the fork is an isolated experiment with minimal impact. The low support suggests the anti-spam idea hasn't caught on with the wider mining community, at least not yet.
The fork's next real test comes at that difficulty adjustment, roughly a year out. Until then, it's a question of whether anyone bothers to keep it alive.
