bitcoin hasnt had a consensus rule change since taproot activated in november 2021, longest quiet stretch in its history. bip-110's signaling window opened around block 961,632 (~aug 9) but stayed below 1% signaling through mid july and only reached about 2% by july 30. no major pool commited, f2pool refused outright, antpool stayed silent, foundry usa opened a hashrate weighted vote instead. looks like its not getting activated
next up is bip-54, which addresses a "timewarp attack" on mining difficulty adjustment. the concern is that an attacker with majority hashrate could theoretically manipulate timestamps to drive difficulty down to its lowest setting in roughly 38-40 days, letting them produce blocks way faster than normal and potentially disrupt lightning networks time based payment contracts. bip-54 would add timestamp limits at the start and end of each 2016 block difficulty period to close this off
the proposal itself isnt even new btw, work goes back to 2023-2024, got its formal bip-54 designation in april 2025, and the spec was marked complete this past may after testing
curious what people here think about the miner coordination problem this reveals. if a genuinely useful fix like bip-54 (closing an actual attack vector rather then adding new functionality) still needs to clear the same signaling threshhold that bip-110 just failed, does bitcoins soft fork activation process need rethinking, or is the high bar working as intended even when its slow
BIP-110 and BIP-54 aren't the same thing. But to not dwell too much, there's a critique on the latter, also from f2pool, here.
Talking about soft forks as if not having one for a while is a bad thing, is odd. These are disruptive things. Ever more is at stake. Let's not blind ourselves to the virtue signal of progress when there is none to be had.
The important part of the critique from f2pool is: make sure the cost is worth it. Currently, there is no finalized proposal that is worth anyone's time, imho.