Ripple CTO emeritus David Schwartz engaged with a staunch supporter of BIP-110 on X, slamming the argument of an attempt to "fix the legacy chain" through the proposal.

The discussion began after an X user described BLAKE2b as an "attack on BTC," comparing the move to earlier Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV (BSV) forks.

BLAKE2b in this context refers to a breakaway Bitcoin hard fork backed by developer Luke Dashjr, which switches Bitcoin's mining system from SHA-256d to the BLAKE2b algorithm and is set to launch on September 1.

X user and BIP-110 supporter Loogart engaged with this initial tweet, questioning why pursuing a different PoW and an alternative chain should be considered an attack when participation is voluntary: "We objected to the direction Bitcoin Core was taking. They told us to fork. We forked and chose a different PoW. Now we're building our own chain. And somehow we're still attacking them."

Schwartz entered the conversation, responding with a tongue-in-cheek remark: "You're not 'still' attacking. You switched from participating in governance to attacking when you refused to accept that you lost," he said.

BIP-110 supporter Loogart responded: "We didn't refuse to accept that we lost. We accepted that we lost the attempt to fix the legacy chain, so we continued Bitcoin elsewhere. How is open dialogue, a soft fork, and, if that fails, another voluntary action like a hard fork an attack? It's all voluntary. Nobody was forced to follow us."

"the attempt to fix the legacy chain"
Listen to yourself.

— David 'JoelKatz' Schwartz (@JoelKatz) August 31, 2026

Quoting part of his response, Schwartz answered, "Listen to yourself," criticizing the presumption implied in the phrase "fix the legacy chain."

What happened?

Bitcoin Knots is attempting a second breakaway chain, weeks after its first attempt, BIP-110, stalled, having produced only two blocks. The new version ditches Bitcoin's SHA-256d proof-of-work for BLAKE2b to stop relying on existing Bitcoin miners, but no major exchange, wallet, or Lightning implementation has yet committed to supporting it.

BIP-110 was a proposed Bitcoin soft fork that would have temporarily restricted the use of block space for non-financial data, specifically the inscriptions, tokens, and arbitrary payloads generated by Ordinals, BRC-20, and Runes protocols. Earlier in August, BIP-110 nodes split off a minority chain that mined two blocks in eight hours before effectively stalling, causing the fork to fail.