This bitcoin miner rejected BIP-110 despite mining through a pool that supported it
Simple Mining used Ocean pool's DATUM protocol to mine block 961,634 on bitcoin's main chain without signaling support for BIP-110, even though its pool backed the proposal by default.
Intelligence analysis by Llama
A single miner operating under Ocean's DATUM protocol deliberately chose not to signal for BIP-110, demonstrating how individual miners can override a pool's default position. BIP-110 had only ~2.6% hashrate support and stalled after producing just two blocks on a minority branch.
Imagine a school vote where one team counts all the votes. DATUM lets each kid put their own paper in the box. Most kids from Simple Mining's team wanted the main pizza, not the experimental one, so they voted for pizza even though their team leader had said yes to the experiment. Because real kids put real votes in the box, the experiment lost.
Analysis
Simple Mining's Choice at Block 961,634
Simple Mining, an operator running machines through the Ocean pool, produced block 961,634 on bitcoin's main chain without signaling support for BIP-110, two blocks after BIP-110 supporters tried to break away at height 961,632. The block was the most concrete proof so far that the proposal did not have the hashrate backing it claimed. By Monday, the main chain had advanced to block 961,725, leaving the BIP-110 minority branch more than 200 blocks behind. The operator framed the decision bluntly on X: "Hashrate is a vote you cannot fake, and we decided the proposal wasn't worth following." That language matters because Ocean had switched its miners to signal for BIP-110 by default in July and was responsible for nearly all of the proposal's prior support, making the override a direct contradiction of the pool's stated position.
The DATUM Protocol's Role
What made the override possible was DATUM, an Ocean-built protocol that returns block-template construction to the individual miner. In a normal pool, the operator aggregates hashrate from many participants, then decides which transactions to include and which consensus signals to attach. DATUM inverts that arrangement: a miner can run its own bitcoin software, build its own template, and still share in Ocean's payouts. Simple Mining used that control to strip the BIP-110 signal out of block 961,634. The same pool, via a different miner, produced the first block that the BIP-110 branch accepted on Saturday, according to fork tracker Mempool. Having Ocean appear on both sides of the split is not a contradiction — it is the protocol working as designed, surfacing what individual operators actually want rather than masking it behind a pool-level default.
Why BIP-110 Stalled Below the 2.6% Threshold
BIP-110 was designed to refuse blocks that did not carry its support signal, starting at block 961,632, but the activation logic only fires once a supermajority of hashrate has signaled readiness. Support peaked at roughly 2.6%, far below the 55% threshold the proposal needed to act as a binding rule. The fork's two-block run, blocks 961,632 and 961,633, was the visible evidence of how thin that support actually was. Once the rejection rule engaged, the minority branch simply could not attract enough hashing power to keep pace with bitcoin's roughly ten-minute cadence. The episode, more than anything about the proposal's merits, demonstrates the practical floor on any attempted soft fork: without genuine and sustained miner buy-in, the activation rules ensure the attempt stalls before it can constrain the main chain.
Key points
- Simple Mining used Ocean's DATUM protocol to mine block 961,634 on bitcoin's main chain without signaling for BIP-110.
- BIP-110 had roughly 2.6% hashrate support, far below the 55% threshold it required, and produced only blocks 961,632 and 961,633 before stalling.
- Ocean had defaulted its miners to signal for BIP-110 in July and supplied nearly all of the proposal's prior mining support.
- By Monday the main chain reached block 961,725, putting the BIP-110 minority branch more than 200 blocks behind.
- DATUM lets individual miners build their own block templates while still contributing hashrate to and sharing payouts with Ocean.
The rapid collapse of BIP-110 may reassure bitcoin holders that the network resists contentious forks without broad miner agreement, keeping the protocol's consensus rules stable and predictable. The episode also showcases DATUM as a working tool for individual operators to express independent positions without leaving their pool, which could broaden the diversity of voices in future governance debates.
A pool that signals by default can manufacture the appearance of hashrate support for a proposal it favors, and BIP-110's 2.6% peak only emerged once that default was tested. If more pools adopt similar defaults, future proposals could attract token signaling that evaporates the moment an activation rule forces operators to put real hashrate on the line, muddying how the network measures genuine consent.
