Schwartz Slams Breakaway Bitcoin Fork as Attack on Original Network

Ripple's David Schwartz has criticized a recent breakaway Bitcoin fork, calling it an attack rather than a legitimate upgrade. The fork, led by BIP-110 supporters, aimed to swap Bitcoin's SHA-256d hashing algorithm for BLAKE2b and introduce new block header structures.

Schwartz argued that the language used by the breakaway faction undermines the foundation of Bitcoin governance decisions, framing the original network as 'legacy' rather than a policy dispute. He emphasized that initiating a hard fork after losing a soft-fork consensus vote does not constitute responsible governance.

The BIP-110 supporters had originally proposed a user-activated soft fork to restrict non-financial data on the Bitcoin blockchain, but failed to secure significant support from miners. After this failure, they pursued a hard fork at block 961,640, effectively repositioning it as an alternative continuation of Bitcoin.