Schwartz Blasts BIP-110 Supporters for Refusing to Accept Soft-Fork Result
The recent BIP-110 vote loss has sparked a heated debate in the Bitcoin community. David Schwartz, Ripple's CTO emeritus, argued that losing a consensus fight does not justify creating a new chain. He claimed that supporters of the fork crossed from governance into an attack by refusing to accept the soft-fork result and continuing on a separate proof-of-work chain.
Schwarz exchanged words with Luke Dashjr, who defended the switch to 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. Schwartz countered that this move amounts to attacking the network.
The BIP-110 chain split from Bitcoin's main chain at block 961,632 after failing to draw enough miner support. The backing pool produced only two blocks before the branch stalled while the main chain kept its normal pace. Dashjr was separately removed as an editor of Bitcoin's improvement proposal repository over a conflict of interest in his handling of BIP-110.