The BLAKE2b chain locked out every SHA-256 rig in existence when it activated on 1 September. The one venue quoting the coin showed a 131.7 per cent bid-ask spread, and no major exchange has listed it at all.
Luke Dashjr's breakaway bitcoin chain has been live for a week, and the highest price anyone has bid for its coin is $82.
That bid appeared on a single small venue listing the fork under the ticker BTCB2, where the gap between bid and ask reached 131.7 per cent. No major exchange has listed the coin. Bitcoin itself traded near $79,000 on Tuesday. Whatever the BLAKE2b chain is, the market has not decided it is money.
The fork activated on 1 September and did something no serious bitcoin breakaway had attempted before: it replaced the proof of work. Bitcoin Knots, the alternative node software Dashjr maintains, now rejects SHA-256d blocks outright. The chain accepts only BLAKE2b, the hashing function Siacoin ASICs have run for years, on hardware such as Bitmain's Antminer A3 and the Goldshell SC5. Every machine currently securing bitcoin is useless on the new chain by design.
That was deliberate. The previous attempt, a soft fork under BIP-110, split from the dominant chain in August and produced two blocks before it stalled. SHA-256 miners declined to build on it; signalling for the proposal peaked at 2.53 per cent against a 55 per cent activation threshold. Swapping the algorithm removed the dependency on miners who had already voted with their hashboards. It also removed any chance of them reconsidering.
The replacement constituency has not turned up either. A reviewer of the open implementation calculated that one version of the proposed starting difficulty would need roughly 870 terahashes per second to hold ten-minute block intervals; measured capacity on the project's test network was 50 to 70 TH/s. Both figures came from unfinished code and neither was a final launch parameter. They framed the problem correctly all the same. Owning compatible hardware isn't the same as pointing it at somebody's chain, and nobody involved disclosed how much Sia-era capacity had been pledged to the mainnet fork. Hashrate on the new chain has fallen since launch.
The surrounding engineering is no kinder. BLAKE2b blocks carry a 164-byte header instead of bitcoin's 80-byte version, so light wallets, indexers and block explorers built over the past fifteen years read the new chain as noise until somebody rewrites them. Dashjr has said light-client compatibility falls outside Bitcoin Knots' scope. Both chains also inherit the same pre-fork balances and history, which means a transaction spending old coins can be valid on both. Knots proposed a SIGHASH_UNIFIED signing mode that gives directional replay protection when a user selects it explicitly, a safeguard that protects nobody who does not already know to ask for it. And the change touches proof of work only. Addresses and signing keys are untouched, so none of this brings the chain any closer to the quantum-resistant spending that bitcoin's researchers have spent the year on.
Facing an empty ledger, Dashjr has sharpened his language rather than his coalition. He calls the SHA-256 chain "Spamcoin" and says exchanges listing it cannot be running their own nodes. On 4 September, answering Swan co-founder Yan Pritzker on X, he made the accusation explicit.
The claim only holds inside Dashjr's own frame. It rests on his position that arbitrary data stored on the main chain is an attack rather than paid-for use of block space, and that position has never commanded agreement among developers or among the custodians holding other people's coins. He resigned as chairman and chief technology officer of the mining pool OCEAN before the split and now runs CONVOY Mining. Adam Back's summary of the episode ran to six words: "Live by the fork, die by the fork."
Bitcoin has been here before, algorithm change included. Bitcoin Gold forked in 2017 specifically to move mining off ASICs and onto graphics cards, and it survives today as a rounding error. What kept the contentious forks of that era alive at all was infrastructure that showed up on day one: venues willing to list the coin, wallets willing to hold it, and hashrate with a commercial reason to point at it. BTCB2 has none of it, and it is recruiting in a year when even the listed SHA-256 operators were losing money at $80,000 bitcoin.
Dashjr's position has always been that everyone else is on the wrong chain. He has now built the ledger that follows from it, and the ledger is producing blocks. That is the complete list of what it has achieved.
