The new mining algorithm is intended to push back against miners that refused to support BIP-110’s signaling requirements.
Bitcoin Knots said on August 11 that it plans to choose a new proof-of-work algorithm for the stalled BIP-110 chain after the minority fork produced only two blocks.
The move sets up another confrontation over Bitcoin’s block policy, while the main network continues producing blocks normally.
Knots Pushes New Algorithm as the Fork Stalls
Knots told users not to downgrade or switch to software that weakens Bitcoin’s consensus rules, warning that doing so could expose them to false confirmations from invalid blocks.
Anyone who had already switched was told to upgrade to the latest Knots client, which the project said would attempt to repair the chain state automatically, and miners restarting nodes were told to add the line maxtipage=2592000 to their configuration file.
It also said a new proof-of-work algorithm would be selected at 14:00 UTC on August 11 through a deterministic random process among proposed candidates. A hash was posted alongside the algorithm announcement as what Knots called a proof of fairness for the random selection process.
The announcement came after the BIP-110 chain stopped at block 961,633, as had been reported by CryptoPotato.
“The Bitcoin network is under attack, and block production has slowed significantly,” wrote the Knots team. “The community is preparing mitigations to resolve the situation.”
However, a community note attached to the post pointed out that the main Bitcoin chain had continued normally. It described the reported “attack” and slowdown as affecting only the minority BIP-110 fork, which split at block 961,632 with roughly 2.5% support.
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The episode has also exposed a sharp disagreement over what constitutes Bitcoin consensus. In a Sunday post, Adam Back argued that BIP-110 lacked sufficient consensus and that economic users and the market had effectively ignored the fork.
Luke Dashjr takes the opposite view. He wrote that BIP-110 has community support and argued that a proof-of-work change could remove the miners he considers responsible for attacking the fork. He later said, “There’s only one Bitcoin chain, and it just activated BIP110.”
The developer has also reportedly been removed as an editor of Bitcoin’s formal improvement proposal repository this week over what was described as a conflict of interest in how he handled the proposal.
Miners and Developers Remain Split
The mining pool Roughnecks, which had been producing blocks on the BIP-110 branch, announced early Saturday that it was pausing operations, calling the pause an escalation rather than a retreat. By Sunday, it reversed course, saying it would resume mining “ASAP” on the stalled chain tip using software it referred to as Knots-RDTS, adding, “We’re wildcatting again.”
Trey Sellers, a Bitcoin holder active in the replies, questioned the economics of that decision, noting that block rewards need 100 confirmations to mature and the fork was producing at most one block a day. Roughnecks responded that it doesn’t give financial advice and that participants should expect the possibility of no return at all.
By the time Roughnecks posted its Sunday update, the main Bitcoin chain had already reached block 961,865, and later tracking put the gap even wider, with one monitor showing the standard chain at 961,980 against a BIP-110 branch still stuck at 961,633.
Bitcoin’s price barely reacted to any of the drama and was trading around $64,000 at the time of writing, down just over 1% in 24 hours and about 47% below its level a year ago, after twice failing to hold above $65,400 in recent sessions.
