If a minority chain appears this weekend, buyers could replay signed fork-coin sales on bitcoin itself, making doing nothing the safest move until the chains can be separated.
- A planned Bitcoin fork tied to the controversial BIP-110 proposal could create duplicate balances on two chains, tempting holders to sell the new coins for what looks like free money.
- Because both chains would initially accept identical transactions, selling the forked coins could trigger a replay attack that also spends the seller’s real bitcoin on the main chain.
- Developers warn that, without built-in replay protection until at least early September, the safest course for non-experts is to avoid moving coins during the potential split.
How BIP-110 makes this possible
The reason any of this is happening is a proposal called BIP-110, which would keep pictures, text and other non-payment data out of bitcoin transactions for a year.
Changing bitcoin's rules requires miners to agree, and they register that agreement by marking the blocks they produce. BIP-110 needs 1,109 marked blocks out of a 2,016-block stretch, or 55%. (A block is the batch of transactions miners add to the ledger roughly every ten minutes.)
That route is closed but the proposal has a second one written into it. From block 961,632, expected this weekend, computers running BIP-110 software will reject any block that does not carry the mark, whether miners agreed or not.
Almost every block being mined right now does not carry it. So those computers will start rejecting the chain that nearly all of bitcoin's mining power is building.
If some miners continue building a BIP-110-compatible branch while the rest keep mining bitcoin as usual, two competing versions of the transaction history could emerge. It stalls if nobody keeps extending the minority branch, it stalls.
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