On Saturday evening, Bitcoin mined block 961,632 — the block a corner of the internet had spent weeks calling a fork, a chain split, even the beginning of the end for Bitcoin. The moment passed the way most such deadlines do: blocks kept coming, wallets kept working, and the chain most of the world follows did not miss a beat. What actually began at that height is the mandatory-signaling phase of BIP-110, a contested proposal whose own numbers had already doomed it.
BIP-110, the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork written by the pseudonymous developer Dathon Ohm, would cap the amount of arbitrary data a transaction can carry — the inscriptions and other non-financial uses its supporters call spam — for roughly a year, after which the restrictions lift automatically. To activate, it asks miners to signal support in 55% of a difficulty window's blocks, a strikingly low bar next to the roughly 95% Bitcoin soft forks have traditionally required.
Miners never came close. Signaling has hovered near 2.5% of blocks, and no window since deployment has come anywhere near the threshold, making activation by consent mathematically impossible. That is what block 961,632 changed: from that height, nodes running Bitcoin Knots with the rules enforced stop tolerating neutrality and reject every block that does not signal. The first blocks after the deadline — the deadline block itself included — carried no signal, and the wider network accepted them without a blink. The enforcers have not split Bitcoin; they have stranded themselves on a chain that is barely growing.
The scare word in the headlines was hard fork, and it is the wrong word. A hard fork loosens the rules — it makes blocks valid that older software would reject, which is why it demands a universal upgrade and why the network split when Bitcoin Cash departed in 2017. BIP-110 does the opposite: it only tightens what is allowed, the textbook definition of a soft fork. The danger never came from the code but from the activation method — a user-activated soft fork, or UASF, in which a determined minority of node operators tries to force the issue, the same gambit as BIP-148 in 2017. A minority UASF backed by 2.5% of miners does not fork Bitcoin in two; it forks itself off.
The principals are not pretending otherwise. Dathon Ohm has urged miners and users to abandon Bitcoin Core for Bitcoin Knots, the alternative software that ships the rules, warning that running Core is not recommended and will become insecure — a claim the network's continued, uneventful operation is not bearing out. Luke Dashjr, who maintains Knots, insists BIP-110 cannot cause a chain split on its own and has floated a proof-of-work change should it fail, a far more radical idea. On the other side, Michael Saylor wrote that the proposal turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate currently valid, fee-paying transactions, and expects Bitcoin to continue normally while BIP-110 stalls into irrelevance; Blockstream's Adam Back and Bitcoin developer Mark Erhardt called it a misguided and unusually careless soft-fork proposal.
If you hold Bitcoin, nothing about this requires action: coins, keys and transactions on the main chain are unaffected, and no exchange or wallet has had to choose sides. The mandatory window will run its course over the coming weeks, and what would genuinely change the picture is large pools flipping to signal, or a minority chain attracting real, sustained hashrate — neither of which exists today. Bitcoin has survived this movie before, in 2017, and the sequel is so far following the same script: the network routes around those who try to force it. This is general market commentary, not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset.