Ripple's CTO Emeritus Accuses Hard Fork Proponents of Lunacy in Bitcoin Governance Fight

Ripple's CTO Emeritus David Schwartz has weighed in on Bitcoin's latest governance fight, calling out proponents of a hard fork proposal as 'lunatic' and 'aggressive'.

The dispute revolves around BIP-110, which was initially proposed as a user-activated soft fork to limit non-financial data on Bitcoin. After failing to gain enough mining power, the group shifted to a hard fork that replaces SHA-256d with BLAKE2b and introduces temporary size caps.

Schwarz argues that once proponents of the hard fork start calling the main chain 'legacy', they depart from good-faith disagreements and enter the realm of attacks and lunacy. He notes that the technical split is real, as BLAKE2b mining is designed to exclude existing ASIC fleets, making it a new proof-of-work coin rather than an upgrade to Bitcoin.

Schwarz emphasizes that people can fork, but branding the winner a broken legacy system after losing a soft-fork vote is not governance, it's a refusal to accept the result. He points out that history has been unkind to similar attempts, such as Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV, which claimed to be more faithful continuations of Bitcoin.