Bitcoin Wars: Knots Developer Luke Dashjr Leaked Messages Bring Controversy, Hardfork Fears

A leaked chat from Bitcoin BTC $109 983 24h volatility: 0.3% Market cap: $2.19 T Vol. 24h: $65.32 B Knots developer Luke Dashjr has added fuel to what some experts are calling a Bitcoin war between Knots and Bitcoin Core, two of the most used software by BTC node runners and miners.

The Rage got the leak covered firsthand on Sept. 25, which brought even more controversy to the so-called Bitcoin wars that are dividing the BTC community into two factions. According to the independent publication led by the renowned journalist L0la L33tz, Luke Dashjr could be planning a hardfork to “save Bitcoin.”

In the conversation, we can see Luke Dashjr effectively planning a solution for dealing with potential Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) downloaded by Bitcoin nodes that Luke’s faction believes will become a problem to the network and node operators after the Bitcoin Core v30 upgrade gets implemented. This upgrade will increase the amount of data that can be stored through OP_RETURN from 80 bytes to 100,000 bytes, allowing for applications like media storage.

Knots surged as an alternative to Core a few years ago, trying to filter out what Luke Dashjr and his supporters deem as spam and harmful to BTC. Michael Saylor was seen showing support to Knots in the past, recently doubling down on it, according to Decrypt. Critics say this is an attempt to censor how people can use Bitcoin, bringing centralization and permission primitives to the system that, in theory, should be decentralized and permissionless.

Bitcoin Controversy Over Luke Dashjr Leaked Messages

Luke Dashjr has deemed The Rage’s work “fake news,” responding to the article and related commentaries on X. Yet, the Knots developer has not directly denied having written the leaked messages, a fact highlighted by the publication in a follow-up to the original report.

An account self-identified as Dashjr’s OCEAN mining pool “chief boiling officer” came to the defense of the developer—calling The Rage’s work “clickbait journalism” and “nonsense” with a meme image—while apparently confirming the leaked exchange happened and was authored by Luke.

Offering a more nuanced perspective to the matter, Bitcoin Core v30 supporter Udi Wertheimer came to the defense of Luke Dashjr, launching harsh criticisms against the independent publication, calling it “luke dashjr hit piece.” Wertheimer said that the “hardfork” claim made for “a sloppy low quality propaganda piece,” explaining the technicalities behind what was being discussed and arguing that there is no need to fear a hardfork.

As things develop, the Bitcoin wars escalate and seem far from an end. BTC is currently trading at around $109,500, after going through a significant crash from $114,000 just two days ago, on Sept. 24, failing to reach some analysts’ short-term price projections and causing even more long liquidations in the market, following Monday Sept. 23’s $1.5 billion historical long-squeeze event.

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