BIP-110 Vote Loss Doesn’t Justify New Chain

The new chain has replaced SHA256d, which is Bitcoin’s mining algorithm with BLAKE2b under its hard-fork rules.

David Schwartz, the Ripple CTO emeritus, argued on August 31 that supporters of Bitcoin’s BIP-110 fork crossed from governance into an attack after rejecting the soft-fork result and continuing on a separate proof-of-work chain.

His exchange with fork supporter loogart captures the dispute: whether losing a consensus fight justifies creating a new Bitcoin chain, or whether that move itself amounts to attacking the network.

New Chain Goes Live

The account loogart opened the exchange by describing the sequence from the group’s perspective: it objected to the direction Bitcoin Core was taking, was told to fork, forked with a different proof-of-work algorithm, and is now building a separate chain, all while still being called an attacker.

“You’re not ‘still’ attacking,” Schwartz wrote in response to loogart’s take. “You switched from participating in governance to attacking when you refused to accept that you lost.”

Loogart replied that their group had accepted defeat and continued their version of Bitcoin elsewhere. They argued that open dialogue, a soft fork, and eventually a hard fork cannot amount to an attack because no one was compelled to follow, writing, “Nobody was forced to follow us.”

However, Schwartz rejected that framing, stating that inventing language that makes disagreement impossible to reason through moves the dispute beyond a good-faith disagreement and into what he called attacks and lunacy.

“I’m not arguing that you are incapable of pretending you have good faith disagreement over governance,” the XRP Ledger architect added. “I’m arguing that there’s lots of evidence that when you do so, you are pretending.”

The chain he referenced went live through 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 size at roughly 300 kilobytes until September 2027.

Bitcoin Knots developer Luke Dashjr defended the switch on August 30, arguing that BLAKE2b carries none of SHA256d’s known weaknesses, such as ASICBoost, and that the redesigned header closes a block-withholding loophole that previously relied on miner monitoring to catch.

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A Fork That Struggled Before It Split Again

As CryptoPotato reported previously, the BIP-110 chain split from Bitcoin’s main chain at block 961,632 after failing to draw enough miner support.

The backing pool, Roughnecks, produced only two blocks before the branch stalled while the main chain kept its normal pace, and the gap between them grew to several hundred blocks within weeks. Dashjr was separately removed as an editor of Bitcoin’s improvement proposal repository over what was described as a conflict of interest in his handling of BIP-110.

The dispute traces back to Bitcoin Core dropping its old limit on OP_RETURN data, which let more non-monetary content, including Ordinals and Runes, fill blocks that BIP-110 supporters wanted reserved for payments.

That disagreement has since split Bitcoin’s online community into camps, exemplified by how one X user, Robin Seyr, called BLAKE2b hostile in the same way Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV (BSV) were viewed, while another poster, Luke Mikic, described BIP-110 as an attempt to fix bugs introduced by Taproot rather than an attack on Bitcoin at all.