The Bitcoin Beacon
As their breakaway chain stalls at two blocks, BIP-110’s backers now plan to swap out Bitcoin’s proof-of-work entirely.
Luke Dashjr, one of Bitcoin’s longest-serving developers, is stepping back from the mining pool he helped build to throw himself at a fork almost no one is mining. On Monday evening he announced a sabbatical as chairman and chief technology officer of Ocean, the Jack Dorsey-backed pool, “to turn my immediate focus to working on Bitcoin and open-source projects.” Ocean’s head of communications, who goes by Bitcoin Mechanic, said he was doing the same. Both called the moves temporary.
The timing is the tell. Dashjr is leaving day-to-day leadership precisely as the technical fight he has championed — the BIP-110 fork — moves from a stalled experiment into a far more radical phase.
Ocean launched in November 2023, financed by a $6.2 million seed round led by Block chief executive and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. It stayed small next to giants like Foundry USA and Antpool, but it built something distinctive: DATUM, a system that lets individual miners construct their own block templates instead of accepting one handed down by the pool operator. That capability made Ocean the natural home for BIP-110’s supporters. Miners used DATUM to produce the first two blocks of the BIP-110 minority chain after it split from Bitcoin at block 961,632.
BIP-110, the “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork,” was written to push data protocols like Ordinals and Inscriptions out of block space. As a soft fork it needed 55% miner support across a 2,016-block window. It got 2.53%, almost all of it from Ocean. Nodes running the software rejected the main chain at 961,632 and struck out on their own — and then almost immediately ground to a halt, saddled with Bitcoin’s inherited 127.48-trillion mining difficulty and a sliver of SHA-256d hashpower. The breakaway chain has managed just two blocks.
Rather than concede, the project is escalating. At an August 10 Bitcoin Knots development meeting, participants began dividing up a proposed hard fork designed to make the minority chain viable on its own. The centerpiece is the most consequential change a Bitcoin-derived network can make: abandoning SHA-256d proof-of-work for an entirely new mining algorithm, which would render every existing bitcoin miner useless on the fork. Dashjr was assigned the block-header and proof-of-work changes; a developer named Kyle took replay protection; Chris Guida drew the job of adapting the softfork logic itself.
The selection method is unusually cloak-and-dagger. Instead of naming the new algorithm in advance, developers plan a commit-reveal: publish a cryptographic hash of a secret mapping first, then use a Bitcoin block produced after 14:00 UTC the next day to pick the winner from a candidate list that includes BLAKE2b-256, SHA3x, BLAKE2s, Scrypt, BLAKE3x2 and Eaglesong. The point is to stop miners and hardware makers from preparing rigs for the winning algorithm before everyone else.
Two other items are treated as essential. Replay protection matters because the fork shares transaction history with Bitcoin; without it, a transaction meant for one chain can be valid on the other. And a deliberately oversized difficulty reset, plus a faster adjustment cycle, is meant to avoid a repeat of the stall — so a small or shifting amount of hashpower can recalibrate within hours instead of waiting out Bitcoin’s normal 2,016-block period.
Dashjr rejects the framing that he is leaving Bitcoin, insisting the dominant chain is the “contentious hardfork” and asking followers whether they will “give in” or “stay on Bitcoin and fight.” Critics across social media have been less reverent, labeling the stranded chain “Lukecoin” and “Knotcoin.” The mockery obscures the genuinely useful thing the episode demonstrates: node operators can enforce any rules they like, but doing so compels no one — not miners, not exchanges, not users — to treat the result as Bitcoin. A two-block chain proposing to swap out its own proof-of-work is Bitcoin’s governance model working exactly as designed, in public and at full volume.
Why it matters: the fight is a live proof that in Bitcoin no single developer, pool, or node sets the rules — the economic majority does.
Quotes are from Dashjr’s public posts on X and reporting of the August 10 Bitcoin Knots development meeting. Fork proposals are in flux and several described changes remain optional; block height (961,632) and difficulty (127.48T) are as reported August 11, 2026.
Free. Five minutes. No hype.
Subscribe free