This bitcoin miner rejected BIP-110 despite mining through a pool that supported it
Ocean, a bitcoin mining pool, had been backing BIP-110 by default. Simple Mining, a company that runs mining machines through Ocean, used software from the pool that lets individual miners choose for themselves and went the other way.
- A miner using the Ocean pool’s DATUM protocol declined to signal support for the controversial BIP-110 fork and instead mined block 961,634 on bitcoin’s main chain.
- Simple Mining’s decision underscored that BIP-110 had only about 2.6% of hashrate support, far short of the 55% threshold it sought to restrict non-financial data in transactions for a year.
- After BIP-110 nodes began rejecting non-signaling blocks at height 961,632, the forked chain produced just two blocks before stalling, while the main bitcoin chain advanced more than 200 blocks ahead.
The choice is notable because Ocean, the pool it mines with, had switched miners to signal for BIP-110 by default in July and accounted for nearly all of the proposal’s small amount of mining support before the split.
BIP-110, short for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal-110, is a move to stop people storing pictures, text and other non-financial data inside bitcoin transactions for a year.
Simple Mining could go the other way because it was using DATUM, an Ocean protocol that gives individual miners control over the blocks they produce.
Mining pools normally combine computing power from many operators so they can find blocks more regularly and share the rewards. The pool usually decides which transactions go into those blocks and what software signals they carry.
