Ripple veteran and XRP Ledger architect David Schwartz has weighed in on the controversy surrounding the failed Bitcoin fork triggered by the activation attempt of BIP-110.
Schwartz ruthlessly lambasted a post from Bitcoin Knots that is deemed to be extremely misleading.
"Is the point of this to embarrass yourselves or to mislead people who don't understand the context?” Schwartz wrote on X. "Regardless of how you feel about BIP-110, you should condemn this nonsense."
Is Bitcoin under attack?
The Bitcoin Knots account recently warned that the Bitcoin network was "under attack" and claimed that block production had slowed significantly.
The account urged users not to downgrade their software or switch to what it described as insecure node implementations.
However, community-provided context attached to the post offered a sharply different interpretation of the events.
According to that explanation, the incident was not an attack on Bitcoin. Instead, BIP-110 failed to activate as a soft fork, causing Bitcoin Knots nodes enforcing the proposal to split from the main Bitcoin chain.
The majority-supported chain continued operating normally.
The chain split occurred at block 961,632, according to monitoring data cited by Bitcoin commentators. The minority BIP-110 chain subsequently fell dramatically behind the main Bitcoin network because it received little support from miners.
At one point, the standard Bitcoin chain had reached block 961,681, while a BIP-110-enforcing node remained at block 961,633. The BIP-110 branch was reportedly producing blocks at intervals of several hours. For context, Bitcoin's normal block production time is roughly 10 minutes.
Despite the minority chain's struggles, Bitcoin Knots has remained defiant. The project advised users who had downgraded their software to upgrade to its latest version and said it was working on a mitigation strategy to repair affected chain states.
Bitcoin Knots also announced plans to select a new proof-of-work algorithm through a deterministic random process.