Luke Dashjr loudly backed BIP-110, but after the controversial proposal pushed Bitcoin into competing branches, roughly 93% of the combined three-hour hashrate shown across Ocean's two fork-specific endpoints was mining the non-BIP-110 chain instead, according to an analysis by The Coinformer.
- The split puts Dashjr, a longtime Bitcoin developer and founder of Ocean, a Bitcoin mining pool designed to give individual miners more control over the blocks they produce, in an unusual position.
- BIP-110, a proposed temporary soft fork that would restrict several ways of storing arbitrary data on Bitcoin, credits Dashjr with the original draft and advice.
When The Coinformer checked Ocean's live dashboards on Aug. 9, the pool's non-BIP-110 endpoint showed a three-hour hashrate of about 19.1 EH/s, compared with 1.36 EH/s on its BIP-110 endpoint.
- OCEAN updates its three-hour hashrate continuously, so the percentages can move as miners redirect their machines.
Nonetheless, the gap is pretty striking given Dashjr's role in both Ocean and BIP-110.
Ocean miners were given a choice
The numbers don't necessarily mean Ocean itself has abandoned BIP-110. The pool's mining model is built around giving miners more control over the blocks they produce.
- Its DATUM protocol, short for Decentralized Alternative Templates for Universal Mining, allows miners to create block templates with their own Bitcoin nodes rather than leaving that decision entirely to a mining pool operator.
That architecture means miners using Ocean can make choices that differ from the preferences of the people running the pool.
Ocean's non-BIP-110 dashboard explicitly identifies itself as the "non-BIP-110/non-RDTS endpoint" and links users to a separate BIP-110 endpoint. The second dashboard does the reverse, making the split visible directly through Ocean's own infrastructure.
So the current distribution is better understood as a measure of where Ocean-connected hash power is choosing to mine, rather than evidence that OCEAN management changed its position.
BIP-110 never won broad miner support
BIP-110, formally called the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, seeks to impose temporary consensus limits on several methods used to place arbitrary data into Bitcoin transactions.
- Among other restrictions, the proposal would cap most new output scripts at 34 bytes, limit OP_RETURN outputs to 83 bytes and restrict certain pushed data to 256 bytes.
- Its stated goal is to discourage using Bitcoin as permanent data storage and refocus the network on monetary use.
The proposal uses a modified activation process requiring support from 55% of blocks in a 2,016-block signaling period for an early lock-in. But it also includes a mandatory signaling phase designed to force a decision even if that threshold is not reached voluntarily. That phase began at block 961,632.
From that height through block 963,647, nodes enforcing BIP-110 reject blocks that don't signal bit 4. Under the proposal, the deployment is then scheduled to lock in by block 963,648 and become active at block 965,664.
The result is that BIP-110-enforcing nodes can follow a different chain from miners continuing to produce blocks without the required signal.
Calling BIP-110 simply a failed soft fork would therefore be imprecise. Its specification explicitly removes the normal FAILED state. The current dispute is taking place during its mandatory signaling period, while the proposed transaction restrictions themselves are not scheduled to activate until block 965,664.
Ocean's own blocks show the divergence
Ocean's block history provides another indication of how sharply the two branches have diverged.
Its BIP-110 endpoint shows OCEAN miners finding blocks 961,632 and 961,633 on the BIP-110 branch on Aug. 8. At the time The Coinformer checked, 961,633 remained the latest Ocean-found block shown there.
Ocean's non-BIP-110 endpoint, meanwhile, shows one of its DATUM miners finding block 961,634 shortly afterward. It later recorded another OCEAN block at height 961,714 on Aug. 9.
Those heights should not be confused with the absolute tip of either network. They are blocks found by OCEAN miners. But they provide direct evidence from the pool itself that its miners continued producing blocks on both sides after BIP-110's mandatory signaling began.