The debates on the future of Bitcoin are not new, but this week, the discussion has taken a sharper advantage. One of the longtime developers of Bitcoin was at the center of a storm on immutability, censorship and what it means to “save” the protocol.
The controversy intensified on September 25, following an article published by the rage pretending to reveal that Luke Dashjr, maintaining Bitcoin Knots software, recommends a hard fork that would install a multisig confidence committee with the power to modify the retroactively blockchain, to examine transactions and to delete illicit content.
A hardchain hard fork is a permanent divergence from the previous version of Blockchain software, forcing all participants to go to the new protocol because the new and old versions are incompatible.
The cited piece has allegedly disclosed text messages in which Dashjr would have warned: “Either Bitcoin dies or we must trust someone.”
History has spread on X, attracting hundreds of thousands of views and intensifying a longtime philosophical rift: should Bitcoin remain a neutral layer of regulation, or should developers actively filter what matters as a legitimate use of the network?
Dashjr rejected complaints. “The truth is that I did not propose a fork or anything, and these bad actors simply grasp the straws to calm me down and try to undermine my efforts to save Bitcoin again,” he wrote.
The rage responded with a meme to ask who sent who sent the disclosed messages that its history shared.
Dashjr repeated its position several times during the next 24 hours. “No, nothing has changed. No one still asks for a hard fork.” He posted. In another response, he stressed: “There is no hard fork.”
The nodes vs divide core
Behind the dispute is a deeper fracture between the Bitcoin Knots project of Dashjr and the wider Bitcoin software used by most of the network.
The nodes apply more strict transaction policies, in particular the blocking of non -financial data such as ordinal inscriptions and runes. Dashjr and his supporters argue that such measures protect the monetary integrity of Bitcoin and save it from regulatory risks. Basic developers have historically adopted a more permissive approach, tolerating non -standard data as long as they do not break consensus.
Fork Hard Fork’s alleged proposal cut at the heart of this tension. For Dashjr’s criticism, he seemed to confirm the fears that his vision requires compromising the principle of Bitcoin’s immutability. For its defenders, the leak was an opportunistic smear designed to derail the case for stronger spam filters.
Among his defenders, there was Udi Wertheimer, co-founder of Taproot Wizards, a Bitcoin Ordinals project, so that most would involve embodying everything Dashjr is opposed.
“Not a fan of Luke, but this is a successful play and false news. He does not offer this,” published Wertheimer on X, referring to the supposed hard fork plan.
“I am not (obviously) not on the side of Luke but … this is only a piece of propaganda of sloppy quality,” he wrote.
Wertheimer concluded that what Dasjhr’s disclosed messages were a hypothetical discussion on the use of zero knowledge of knowledge to allow the knots to avoid downloading the “spam”.
“It is, as always, a burger nothing,” he concluded. “It is quite obvious to me that this proposal is never implemented, and even if it does, it does not censor the network and does not divide the network and remains entirely compatible with Core.”
It should be noted that in the past 24 hours, Slipped 2.2% to negotiate at around $ 109,000, a drop of more than 5.5% last week.
Although there is no direct proof connecting this diver to the controversy on the alleged levels of Dashjr, the moment is not useful. In the cryptographic markets, uncertainty alone can amplify the downward pressure and rumors of protocol upheavals tend to stir up exactly this.
