Bitcoin Knots Developers Plan an August 30 Test That Replaces Bitcoin's Mining Algorithm

Supporters of Bitcoin Knots, the alternative Bitcoin client maintained by developer Luke Dashjr, are preparing a second attempt at a breakaway chain after the first one stopped producing blocks almost immediately. Dashjr on August 29 told miners running standard SHA-256 hardware to stop mining ahead of an August 30 test that would replace Bitcoin's proof-of-work function with BLAKE2b on the proposed network. The substitution is deliberate. It removes the fork's dependence on the industrial mining fleet that has declined to support it.

The dispute behind the fork is about what belongs in a Bitcoin block. Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 (BIP-110), called the Reduced Data Temporary Soft Fork, would limit arbitrary non-financial data in transactions for one year. Miner signaling for it reached roughly 2.56 percent against a threshold of 1,109 blocks out of 2,016, so the rule never gained the hash power that a soft fork needs to hold. Developer Chris Guida then rebased Dashjr's 2017 proof-of-work hard-fork code onto current Knots as a contingency if miners refused.

CryptoSlate reports that the rehearsal still lacks settled activation parameters, a disclosed day-one hash rate, named exchange and service policies, and universal replay protection. Replay protection matters most for ordinary holders. Without it, a transaction broadcast on one chain can be rebroadcast on the other, and users can lose coins they intended to keep on a single side of a split.

The episode is a live measurement of where authority sits in Bitcoin. A long-standing developer can write and ship consensus code, but he cannot move hash power, and the group willing to abandon SHA-256 to escape that constraint is, so far, small. Nothing about the exercise threatens the main chain's security. It does test the claim that client diversity gives dissenting developers a real path to change the rules.