Your Exchange Is Selling ‘Fake Bitcoins,' Says the Bitcoin Knots Developer

Bitcoin Knots developer Luke Dashjr says major exchanges now sell fake bitcoins, days after the Bitcoin hard fork split his BLAKE2b chain from the network.

He blames platforms that skipped running their own full nodes. Meanwhile, the rest of the market treats his chain as dead.

Bitcoin Hard Fork Sparks a Fake Coin Accusation

The row started on X. Swan co-founder Yan Pritzker asked Dashjr whether he truly believed exchanges skip the node operation.

Dashjr replied that competent operators would never list the SHA-256 chain. “If they did, they wouldn’t be selling fake bitcoins now. Unless you’re saying it’s intentional fraud,” he wrote.

If they did, they wouldn't be selling fake bitcoins now. Unless you're saying it's intentional fraud

— Luke Dashjr (@LukeDashjr) September 4, 2026

Earlier in the thread, he called established exchanges incompetent and accused them of blindly following ex-miners out of Bitcoin. However, that framing rests on his own view of which ledger counts. He has argued for months that spam data on the main chain is an attack on the network. Ripple’s former CTO, David Schwartz, dismissed that claim as nonsense.

He also labels the SHA-256 chain “Spamcoin” and wants exchanges to stop advertising it as Bitcoin.

The Bitcoin hard fork permanently swapped SHA-256 for BLAKE2b. That change locks out every existing ASIC rig. Dashjr resigned as chairman and CTO of mining pool OCEAN before the split, and he now leads CONVOY Mining.

Miners and Traders Ignore the Split

So far, no major exchange has listed the forked coin. One small venue opened deposits under the ticker BTCB2, where bids reached $82 earlier this week.

Bitcoin (BTC) meanwhile trades near $80,670 after a 3.83% gain in 24 hours. A bid-ask spread of 131.7% on that venue pointed to almost no genuine demand.

Miner support for the Bitcoin hard fork never arrived either. Signaling for the BIP-110 fork peaked at 2.53%, far below the 55% threshold. An August attempt died after two blocks.

Since the September 1 split, hashrate on the new chain has kept falling. Blockstream CEO Adam Back summed the episode up in one line.

“Live by the fork, die by the fork,” he said.

Therefore, Dashjr now stands almost alone. Whether anyone besides his supporters keeps mining BLAKE2b will decide how long the fake bitcoins claim survives.