Bitcoin's BIP-110 fork ground to a halt this week after producing just two blocks. The breakaway chain inherited Bitcoin's mining difficulty, but only a tiny share of hashpower is actually mining it, leaving blocks hours apart while both chains still accept the same transactions.
Two blocks, then nothing
Block explorers show the fork stopped after its second block. No new blocks have been found since, and at the current pace, the network is effectively frozen. The chain hasn't died outright, but it's not moving either.
The difficulty problem
The core issue is simple math. BIP-110 forked off Bitcoin without adjusting the difficulty target. That means miners on the new chain need the same massive amount of work to find a block as they do on Bitcoin proper, but they're doing it with a fraction of the network's total computing power.
Bitcoin's difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks, but a chain that can't find blocks quickly will never reach that threshold. So the fork is stuck in a loop of slow, near-impossible mining. The two blocks that did come out were hours apart, and the next one could take far longer.
Both chains still see the same transactions
Because the fork hasn't diverged much, both chains still accept the same transactions. That means no replay protection, no clear split in economic activity. It's a fork in name only so far, with no real network effect or community push behind it.
For now, the fork is a cautionary example of what happens when you split Bitcoin's code without splitting its difficulty. The chain isn't dead, but it's barely breathing.
