Ocean, a Bitcoin mining pool, had enabled BIP-110 signaling by default. Simple Mining, which operates mining hardware through Ocean, took a different approach by using the pool’s software that allows individual miners to decide which rules and signals their blocks follow.
On Sunday, Simple Mining chose not to support BIP-110, using a feature provided by Ocean that gives miners control over the contents of the blocks they produce instead of automatically following the pool’s settings.
The company said it mined block 961,634 on Bitcoin’s main chain, two blocks after BIP-110 supporters had created a separate branch.
“Hashrate is a vote you cannot fake, and we decided the proposal wasn’t worth following,” Simple Mining said in a post on X.
The company explained that it mined the block through Ocean’s DATUM protocol and deliberately left out the BIP-110 signal. Support for the proposal had reached only about 2.6%, well below the 55% threshold required for activation.
The decision is significant because Ocean had changed its default settings in July to signal support for BIP-110. Before the chain split, the pool represented almost all of the limited mining power backing the proposal.
BIP-110, or Bitcoin Improvement Proposal-110, seeks to restrict the inclusion of images, text and other non-monetary data in Bitcoin transactions for one year.
Simple Mining was able to reject the proposal because it was using DATUM, an Ocean protocol that allows individual miners to exercise greater control over the blocks they produce.
Mining pools generally combine the computing resources of multiple miners, increasing their chances of finding blocks and distributing the resulting rewards among participants. In the traditional setup, the pool determines which transactions are included and which software signals a block carries.
DATUM changes that arrangement by allowing individual operators to construct their own blocks while continuing to contribute hashpower to Ocean and receive a share of the pool’s rewards.
Simple Mining used that flexibility to remove the BIP-110 signal from block 961,634.
“We chose not to signal and the chain extended on our block,” the company said.
The incident also helps explain why Ocean appeared on both sides of the weekend’s chain split. According to fork tracker Mempool, a miner operating through Ocean produced the first block accepted by the BIP-110 branch on Saturday. Simple Mining later used the same pool but chose not to support the proposal, producing a block that remained on Bitcoin’s main chain.
Nodes running BIP-110 software began rejecting blocks without the required signal at block 961,632. At that point, support for the proposal had peaked at around 2.6%, significantly below the 55% threshold required.
The minority chain quickly fell behind. It produced blocks 961,632 and 961,633 before stopping, while the main Bitcoin network continued generating blocks at roughly 10-minute intervals.
By Monday, a live blockchain monitor showed the main chain at block 961,725, leaving the BIP-110 branch more than 200 blocks behind.
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