Ocean pool backed BIP-110 by default, but Simple Mining used the pool's own DATUM protocol to go the other way.

A bitcoin miner operating through the Ocean mining pool declined to signal support for the controversial BIP-110 fork, instead mining block 961,634 on bitcoin's main chain. The decision by Simple Mining highlighted that BIP-110 had garnered only about 2.6% of hashrate support — far below the 55% threshold the proposal required to restrict non-financial data in bitcoin transactions for one year.

After BIP-110 nodes began rejecting non-signaling blocks at height 961,632, the forked chain produced just two blocks before stalling entirely, while the main bitcoin chain surged more than 200 blocks ahead.

Simple Mining said it produced block 961,634 on the main chain, two blocks past the point where BIP-110 supporters broke away.

"Hashrate is a vote you cannot fake, and we decided the proposal wasn't worth following," Simple Mining wrote on X.

We mined block 961,634 using Ocean's DATUM protocol. The block didn't signal support for BIP-110. Support peaked at 2.6% while the proposal needed 55%. Hashrate is a vote you cannot fake, and we decided the proposal wasn't worth following. Ocean's DATUM protocol gave us the… pic.twitter.com/wYYq20dsam — Simple Mining (@simpleminingio) August 9, 2026

The choice is notable because Ocean, the pool Simple Mining mines with, had switched miners to signal for BIP-110 by default in July and accounted for nearly all of the proposal's limited mining support prior to the split. Ocean was launched in late 2023 by bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr, who has been a vocal critic of embedding non-financial data on the bitcoin blockchain and promoted BIP-110 as a remedy.

BIP-110, short for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal-110, is an initiative to prevent people from storing pictures, text, and other non-financial data inside bitcoin transactions for a period of one year. The proposal emerged amid a surge of such activity following the introduction of Ordinals and related inscription techniques, which allow arbitrary data — including images and text — to be inscribed onto individual satoshis and have driven a significant share of bitcoin transaction volume since early 2023. Proponents argue these inscriptions bloat the blockchain and crowd out legitimate payments, while opponents contend that users should remain free to transact as they see fit.

Simple Mining was able to diverge from the pool's default because it was using DATUM, an Ocean protocol that gives individual miners control over the blocks they produce. Mining pools typically combine computing power from many operators to find blocks more regularly and share rewards. Under the conventional model, the pool decides which transactions are included in blocks and what software signals those blocks carry.

DATUM shifts that decision back to the individual miner. An operator can build its own block using its own bitcoin software while still contributing computing power to Ocean and sharing in the pool's payouts. Simple Mining leveraged that control to omit the BIP-110 signal from block 961,634.

"We chose not to signal and the chain extended on our block," the company said.

This also explains why Ocean appeared on both sides of the weekend split. According to fork tracker Mempool, a miner using Ocean produced the first block accepted by the BIP-110 branch on Saturday. Simple Mining then used the same pool and made the opposite choice, producing a block for the dominant bitcoin chain.

Computers running BIP-110 software began rejecting blocks that did not carry its signal at block height 961,632, after miner support peaked at approximately 2.6% — well below the 55% the proposal required. The minority branch has struggled since. It produced blocks 961,632 and 961,633 before stalling, while bitcoin continued producing blocks roughly every ten minutes. When a forked chain falls this far behind, reorganizing onto the dominant chain becomes computationally impractical, effectively consigning the minority branch to abandonment.

By Monday, a live monitor showed the main chain at block 961,725, placing the BIP-110 branch more than 200 blocks behind. The episode underscores the role hashrate consensus plays in bitcoin governance: unlike protocols governed by committees or foundation boards, bitcoin forks succeed or fail based on whether enough miners commit energy to build on them in real time.