David Schwartz, Ripple's chief technology officer emeritus, said on August 31 that supporters of Bitcoin's BIP-110 fork transitioned from participating in network governance to launching an attack once they rejected the soft-fork result and continued building on a separate proof-of-work chain.
The Core Dispute
Schwartz's remarks came during an exchange on X with loogart, who represented the fork's position. Loogart described the sequence as follows: the group objected to Bitcoin Core's direction, was told to fork, adopted a different proof-of-work algorithm, and is now maintaining a separate chain — all while being labeled an attacker.
"You switched from participating in governance to attacking when you refused to accept that you lost," Schwartz wrote in response.
Loogart countered that no one was compelled to follow the fork, arguing that open dialogue, a soft fork, and ultimately a hard fork cannot constitute an attack on that basis. Schwartz dismissed the framing, stating that inventing language that makes disagreement impossible to reason through moves a dispute beyond good faith and into what he called "attacks and lunacy."
Technical Details of the New Chain
The fork went live through a flag-day hard fork at block 961,640. Key changes include:
- Replacement of SHA256d with BLAKE2b as the mining algorithm
- Introduction of a new 164-byte block header
- Temporary rules capping block size at approximately 300 kilobytes until September 2027
Bitcoin Knots developer Luke Dashjr defended the algorithm 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 required miner monitoring to detect.
A Fork That Struggled to Gain Traction
The BIP-110 chain initially split from Bitcoin's main chain at block 961,632 after failing to attract sufficient miner support. The backing pool, Roughnecks, produced only two blocks before the branch stalled, and the gap between it and the main chain 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.
Root Cause of the Split
The disagreement traces back to Bitcoin Core dropping its old limit on OP_RETURN data, which allowed more non-monetary content — including Ordinals and Runes — to fill blocks that BIP-110 supporters wanted reserved for payments. The dispute has since divided Bitcoin's online community, with some comparing BLAKE2b to the hostility once directed at Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV, while others view BIP-110 as a bug fix related to Taproot rather than an attack on the network.
