On September 1, Luke Dashjr, a well-known developer and advocate of radical changes to Bitcoin, launched his own hard fork with the ambitious goal of bringing mining back to ordinary computers. However, ambition collided with harsh reality: the network using the BLAKE2b algorithm, intended to replace SHA-256, received only a symbolic share of computing power, and exchanges and miners effectively ignored the event.
The essence of the conflict and inevitable failure
At the core of Dashjr's initiative was proposal BIP-110, which called for removing all non-payment-related data from Bitcoin blocks. Dashjr himself calls the main network "Spamcoin," but the overwhelming majority of market participants viewed the September 1 network split as an empty gesture. This is not the first such experiment: back in August, the BIP-110 branch survived only two blocks before miners from the OCEAN pool, without explicit consent, redirected their hashing power back to the main chain.
The key mistake was changing the hashing algorithm. The switch to BLAKE2b automatically "cut off" Luke Dashjr from the industrial hardware that underpins the entire Bitcoin mining economy. Specialized ASIC devices optimized for SHA-256 became useless for the new network. The result was swift: the fork's hashrate collapsed almost immediately after launch.
Community reaction and market realities
Blockstream CEO Adam Back delivered a concise and biting summary of events: "Live by the fork, die by the fork." Dashjr himself, however, continues to insist that his secondary chain is the "real Bitcoin." In his statements, he claims that the BTC ticker belonged to the original network for over a decade, and now Bitcoin has "moved" to BLAKE2b. Network data suggests otherwise: he had already voiced similar arguments in August through his Bitcoin Knots project, and former Ripple CTO David Schwartz called them nonsense at the time.
The market also showed no interest whatsoever. The main network operated without issues, and BTC traded near $76,900. No major exchange added the new coin to its listings. Only a small test platform opened order acceptance under the ticker BTCB2—the new network has no official designation yet. Tellingly, buy orders for BTCB2 never rose above $82, nearly 900 times lower than Bitcoin's price. The cheapest sell order was set at $190, and a spread of 131.7% speaks volumes about the absence of real trading.
My conclusion: This episode once again demonstrates that any attempt to forcibly change Bitcoin's consensus without support from miners and exchanges is doomed to fail. The Bitcoin network is not code but a complex socio-economic consensus, and ignoring the interests of key market participants makes any hard fork a stillborn project by design.