A breakaway bitcoin chain is now so short of miners that its own mechanism for fixing that is six years away.
The chain that broke away from bitcoin on Saturday has not moved since. It is still sitting on block 961,633, its second. Bitcoin has since climbed to block 961,959, leaving the fork 326 blocks behind.
The split happened because of a proposal called BIP-110, which would stop people storing pictures, text and other non-payment data in 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 needed 55% of blocks over a two-week stretch. It got about 2.6% at its peak.
But rather than accept that, the proposal had a second route built into it. At block 961,632, computers running BIP-110 software began rejecting every block that did not carry the mark, regardless of what miners had decided.
Almost no blocks carry it, so those computers rejected the chain nearly all of bitcoin's mining power was building and started following one made only of blocks that did.
