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.
And letting them in is an explicit design goal, not an accident. The draft implementation is Bitcoin Knots pull request #359, opened 15 August by Luke Dashjr. Its own description states that it "aims to be compatible with PoW hardware produced by several (6 IIRC) vendors." We read that PR directly rather than taking anyone's summary of it.
Luke has also said publicly, on 13 August, that "support for BLAKE2b also allows BLAKE2b-Sia miners, since the latter is a strict subset of the former," adding "Disclaimer: Have not tested yet."
So the honest position is narrower than "unresolved." The author of the change expects existing Sia-class ASICs to work, and has not tested it. The PR is still marked an unfinished draft, the block header is being reshaped, and nobody has publicly run real silicon against the final construction. Anyone stating flatly that a given box will or will not work is ahead of the evidence in either direction.
There is a real argument for it. A young chain with almost no hashpower is cheap to attack, and an existing pool of BLAKE2b miners is the fastest defense available. It is also worth knowing that this exact lever has been pulled before, in both directions: Siacoin once hard-forked to an altered BLAKE2b specifically to permit one vendor's ASIC and exclude every other, which is what produced Sia Classic, Sia Prime and Hyperspace.
One more thing from that same thread, because it is the sort of detail that gets lost. A miner replied to Luke noting that a CPU-only algorithm with memory hardening was an available option and is not what got chosen, and raised FPGAs as the further risk. That is reprogrammable hardware sitting between a general-purpose CPU and a fixed-function ASIC, and it can be pointed at whatever algorithm a chain picks. It is a third category this site has not covered and should.
What survives 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 and it is the reason this site exists. It is not the same claim as "ASICs are gone," and on current evidence that second claim looks like it will stay false on purpose.
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.
There is a September 1 date, and it is a target, not a schedule. Luke Dashjr gave it himself on 11 August, answering a mining pool asking whether to start mining BLAKE2b immediately: "Target is Sep 1. Need to write and properly test the code first... Until it's ready, SHA2 continues on."
Read the second half as carefully as the first. The date is conditioned on finished, tested code, and the implementation is still an unfinished draft. The pull request deploys by block height, not by calendar date, and no height has been set either.
Chris Guida, who assembled the proof-of-work code, wrote on 4 August 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 deadline for activation has been set, and none is required to be set unless miners actually betray bitcoin."
Read that date. It is four days before the split. The same post ends: "I don't expect this code to be needed at all. I expect the miners to simply do the right thing and activate bip110 smoothly." They did not. We quote it anyway, dated, because it is the clearest statement of intent anyone has given and because watching a prediction age is more useful than quietly dropping it.
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. ↩