Ripple CTO Emeritus: BIP-110 Vote Loss Doesn’t Justify New Chain

David Schwartz, the Ripple CTO emeritus, argued on August 31 that supporters of Bitcoin’s BIP-110 fork crossed from governance into an attack after rejecting the soft-fork result and continuing on a separate proof-of-work chain.

His exchange with fork supporter loogart captures the dispute: whether losing a consensus fight justifies creating a new Bitcoin chain, or whether that move itself amounts to attacking the network.

New Chain Goes Live

The account loogart opened the exchange by describing the sequence from the group’s perspective: it objected to the direction Bitcoin Core was taking, was told to fork, forked with a different proof-of-work algorithm, and is now building a separate chain, all while still being called an attacker.

“You’re not ‘still’ attacking,” Schwartz wrote in response to loogart’s take. “You switched from participating in governance to attacking when you refused to accept that you lost.”

Loogart replied that their group had accepted defeat and continued their version of Bitcoin elsewhere. They argued that open dialogue, a soft fork, and eventually a hard fork cannot amount to an attack because no one was compelled to follow, writing, “Nobody was forced to follow us.”

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