Ripple CTO Emeritus Slams Bitcoin's BIP-110 Legacy Chain Fix: 'Listen to Yourself'

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.”

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.