Luke Dashjr's ambitious project to create an alternative branch of Bitcoin was doomed to fail from the very start. The hard fork launched on September 1, intended to "cleanse" the blockchain of everything not related to payments, met with complete indifference from key industry players. The new network based on the BLAKE2b algorithm effectively ended up without computing power, and the community's reaction was more than telling.
The essence of the conflict and technical miscalculations
The BIP-110 proposal promoted by Dashjr called for a radical change to the structure of Bitcoin blocks. In the author's view, the main network had turned into a "spamcoin" clogged with non-financial data. However, most market participants regarded the September 1 network split as nothing more than a technical curiosity not worth attention.
The key mistake was the decision to switch the hashing algorithm from SHA-256 to BLAKE2b. This step automatically cut off the new branch from the entire arsenal of industrial Bitcoin mining equipment. The ASIC devices that underpin the security of the main network proved useless for the fork. As a result, the hash rate of the new chain collapsed almost immediately after launch, and attempts to attract miners came to nothing.
Industry reaction: from sarcasm to indifference
Blockstream CEO Adam Back, known for his uncompromising stance, summed up this saga in one phrase: "Live by the fork, die by the fork." In that sarcasm lies the whole essence of what happened. Dashjr, however, continues to insist that it is his secondary chain that is the "real Bitcoin," claiming that the BTC ticker has belonged to his project for over a decade, and that the main network now runs on BLAKE2b. Blockchain data says otherwise.
Notably, Dashjr made similar statements in August through his Bitcoin Knots client. At the time, former Ripple CTO David Schwartz openly called them nonsense. Traders also showed no interest: the main network operated without issues, and BTC traded near $76,900.
Major exchanges were in no hurry to list the new coin. Only a small test platform opened order submissions under the ticker BTCB2, since the network still has no official designation. Even there, however, activity is minimal: buy orders have not risen above $82 — roughly 900 times less than Bitcoin's price. The spread between the best bid and ask prices reaches 131.7%, clearly indicating the absence of real trading and extremely low liquidity.
This episode is a vivid demonstration that even the loudest initiatives to "improve" Bitcoin shatter against the harsh reality of consensus. Without support from miners, exchanges, and users, any fork is merely a digital ghost. Dashjr's attempt to impose his vision of the network on the community, ignoring the mechanisms of market and technical coordination, ended in predictable failure. The lesson is simple: in the world of decentralized assets, strength lies not in the ambitions of individual developers, but in the ability to offer a solution that the ecosystem truly needs — not just its author.