David Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO Emeritus, argued on August 31 that supporters of the BIP-110 fork of Bitcoin moved from governance to attack after rejecting the outcome of the soft fork and continuing on a separate proof-of-work chain.
His exchange with fork supporter Loogart captures the dispute: whether losing a consensus fight justifies the creation of a new Bitcoin chain, or whether this decision itself amounts to attacking the network.
A new channel is launched
The Loogart account open the exchange by describing the sequence from the group’s perspective: it objected to the direction Bitcoin Core was taking, was asked to fork, forked with a different proof-of-work algorithm, and is now building a separate chain, while still being labeled an attacker.
“You’re not attacking ‘yet,'” Schwartz wrote in response to Loogart’s notice. “You went from participating in governance to attacking when you refused to accept that you lost. »
Loogart responded that their group had accepted defeat and continued their version of Bitcoin elsewhere. They argued that an open dialogue, a soft fork, and ultimately a hard fork cannot constitute an attack because no one was forced to follow, writing: “No one was forced to follow us.”
However, Schwartz rejected this formulation, declaring that the invention of language that makes disagreements impossible to reason with moves the dispute beyond good faith disagreement and into what he calls attacks and madness.
“I’m not saying that you are incapable of pretending that you have a good faith disagreement on governance,” added the architect of XRP Ledger. “I say there’s plenty of evidence that when you do it, you’re faking it.”
The channel he referred to went live via a Flag Day hard fork at block 961,640, replacing SHA256d with BLAKE2b as the mining algorithm. The update also introduced a new 164-byte block header and temporary rules capping block sizes at around 300 kilobytes until September 2027.
Luke Dashjr, developer of Bitcoin Knots defended the change on August 30, arguing that BLAKE2b has none of the known weaknesses of SHA256d, such as ASICBoost, and that the redesigned header closes a block retention flaw that previously relied on miner monitoring to detect.
A fork that struggled before splitting again
As CryptoPotato As previously reported, the BIP-110 chain split from Bitcoin’s main chain at block 961,632 after failing to attract enough support from miners.
The support pool, Roughnecks, produced only two blocks before the branch stalled while the main chain maintained its normal pace, and the gap between them widened to several hundred blocks in a matter of weeks. Dashjr was separately removed as editor of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal Repository due to what was described as a conflict of interest in its handling of BIP-110.
The dispute dates back to Bitcoin Core abandoning its old limit on OP_RETURN data, which allowed more non-monetary content, including ordinals and runes, to fill the blocks that BIP-110 proponents wanted reserved for payments.
This disagreement has since divided the online Bitcoin community into camps, exemplified by how one
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