What is actually known about the BLAKE2b proof-of-work contingency, what it would take to mine it, and what the hardware really does. Sources over summaries. No advice, no affiliate links, nothing for sale.
"A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, if you can keep it, ma'am."1
The proposed change
Worth separating two things that get conflated. BIP-110 itself is the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, a soft fork restricting arbitrary data storage. It says nothing about proof-of-work, and it was marked Closed in the BIP repository on 9 August. The BLAKE2b swap is a separate contingency, written afterward, once BIP-110 had failed to reach miner support. The RDTS chain and a future BLAKE2b chain are not the same thing, and this site tries hard not to blur them.
This is the part most coverage skips, and it cuts against the name of this site, so it goes near the top rather than the bottom.
BLAKE2b mining chips exist and are sold today. Goldshell's SC line is marketed on the "Blake2B-Sia" algorithm and has been mining Siacoin and ScPrime for years. Current units are rated in the tens of terahashes. A good desktop CPU on the same algorithm is roughly four to five orders of magnitude behind that.
Whether those chips could mine a Bitcoin BLAKE2b chain is unresolved, and it is a design decision rather than a law of physics. The exact BLAKE2b variant, the header layout and the digest length all determine compatibility, and there is direct precedent for tuning them deliberately: Siacoin once hard-forked to an altered BLAKE2b specifically to permit one vendor's ASIC and lock out every other, which is what produced Sia Classic, Sia Prime and Hyperspace.
There is a coherent argument for letting the existing fleet in. A young chain with almost no hashpower is cheap to attack, and an established pool of BLAKE2b miners is the fastest available defense. There is an equally coherent argument for locking them out. No client has been released and no parameters have been published, so anyone telling you flatly that a given ASIC will or will not work is guessing.
What can be said honestly: the BLAKE2b ASIC fleet is tiny next to SHA-256, so a CPU's relative position is far better than it is on Bitcoin today. That is a real difference. It is not the same claim as "ASICs are gone," and this site is not going to make the second one until something makes it true.
On 8 August, at block 961,632, Roughnecks mined the first block signaling BIP-110. F2Pool then built on a block that RDTS nodes reject, and the two chains parted.
The RDTS chain has reached 961,635 and has not moved since 12 August. The majority-hashpower chain is past 962,700 and adds roughly 144 blocks a day. Three blocks against a thousand is the number to sit with, and it is the honest starting point for anything else on this site.
The algorithm change is not scheduled. Chris Guida, who put the code together, has said plainly that it is "just some code to have in our back pocket in case miners betray bitcoin, to activate at some point later," and that no activation deadline has been set. A September 1 date has been floated. Treat it as an intention, not a schedule.
Heights here are read from our own Bitcoin Knots node enforcing consensusrules=rdts, not copied from a third party. Public explorers running Bitcoin Core rules cannot show you the RDTS tip at all. Cross-check against the live sources, and tell us if we drift.
A place to find out what is true right now, and what it would actually take to mine this if it ever ships. Chain status read from our own node. Hardware numbers measured rather than repeated. Links to the people and repositories doing the real work.
It is not an advice site. Nothing here tells you what to buy or what to do. The author holds BLAKE2b-capable mining hardware bought speculatively, before any of this is settled, and says so on the disclosure page rather than pretending to a neutrality nobody in this fight has.
There is nothing for sale, no sponsor, no affiliate link and no newsletter funnel. If it ever becomes possible to support the work directly, that will be an ask, not a toll.
One email when there is something worth your time: a released client, an activation height, real measured hardware numbers, or news that actually changes the picture. No newsletter, no countdown timers, nothing to buy.
We'll use it for exactly that and nothing else. How we handle it.
1. After Benjamin Franklin, leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Asked by Elizabeth Willing Powel what kind of government the delegates had produced, he answered: "A republic, if you can keep it." The exchange survives in James McHenry's diary. Constitution maps to whitepaper, republic maps to peer-to-peer electronic cash. The wording here mirrors the whitepaper's actual title rather than paraphrasing it. ↩