Bitcoin Knots Developer Claims Exchanges Sell Fake Bitcoins

Bitcoin Knots developer Luke Dashjr accuses major exchanges of selling fake bitcoins following the Bitcoin hard fork that split his BLAKE2b chain from the network. He blames exchanges for not operating their own full nodes, while the market largely disregards his chain. The controversy began on X when Swan co-founder Yan Pritzker questioned Dashjr's belief about exchanges skipping node operations. Dashjr stated that competent operators would not list the SHA-256 chain, implying that selling fake bitcoins could be seen as intentional fraud. He criticized established exchanges as incompetent and accused them of following ex-miners blindly. Dashjr refers to the SHA-256 chain as 'Spamcoin' and urges exchanges to stop marketing it as Bitcoin. The hard fork permanently replaced SHA-256 with BLAKE2b, rendering existing ASIC rigs obsolete. Dashjr resigned from his position at mining pool OCEAN before the split and now leads CONVOY Mining. No major exchange has listed the forked coin, although a small venue opened deposits under the ticker BTCB2, with bids reaching 82 dollars earlier this week. Bitcoin (BTC) trades near 80670 dollars after a 3.83% gain in 24 hours, but the bid-ask spread of 131.7% indicates low genuine demand. Miner support for the hard fork has been minimal, with signaling for the BIP-110 fork peaking at only 2.53%, far below the required 55% threshold. Since the September 1 split, hashrate on the new chain has continued to decline.