Ripple CTO Defends Bitcoin Against Erratic Hard Fork Proposal

Ripple CTO emeritus David Schwartz has drawn a sharp line under Bitcoin’s latest governance fight, arguing that a breakaway plan to “fix” the main chain is no longer a policy debate. It is, in his view, an attack dressed up as reform.

The remarks landed on Aug. 31 in a reply to BIP-110 supporter loogart, who said the group had accepted defeat on Bitcoin itself and would “continue Bitcoin elsewhere.”

Loogart framed a failed soft fork, then a voluntary hard fork, as open dialogue rather than an assault. Schwartz zeroed in on one phrase: “the attempt to fix the legacy chain.”

“Listen to yourself,” he wrote.

That wording is the heart of the dispute. BIP-110 began as a user-activated soft fork aimed at limiting non-financial data on Bitcoin. It did not win enough mining power. The enforcing minority produced only a couple of blocks, while SHA-256d miners kept building the chain the market still treats as Bitcoin.

Supporters then shifted to a hard fork that replaces SHA-256d with BLAKE2b, adds a new block header, and imposes temporary size caps. Launch was tied to a flag day around block 961,640 in late August.

The pitch is that the new chain is Bitcoin continued by other means. Schwartz’s point is that once you rename the dominant network the “legacy” chain that needs fixing, you have stopped arguing inside Bitcoin’s rules and started inventing a language that cannot be answered in good faith.

In a follow-up, he put it more bluntly: inventing that language “depart[s] the realm of good faith disagreements and enter[s] the realm of attacks and lunacy.”

The technical split is real. BLAKE2b mining is designed so existing ASIC fleets cannot simply follow the rebels.

That is the point. It also means the project is a new proof-of-work coin with a Bitcoin backstory, not an upgrade the economic majority adopted.

No major exchange, wallet, or Lightning stack had committed to the fork before launch. Hashrate, liquidity, and ticker recognition remain with SHA-256d Bitcoin.

History’s unkind to this pattern. Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV also claimed they were the more faithful continuation. Markets kept the original.

David Schwartz is not saying people cannot fork. He is saying losing a soft-fork vote, then branding the winner a broken legacy system, is not governance. It is a refusal to accept the result.

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