TL;DR:
The failure of the soft fork BIP-110, designed to temporarily limit the volume of non-financial data on the Bitcoin network, did not silence the debate, but deepened it.
David Schwartz, former chief technology officer of Ripple and principal architect of the XRP Ledger, stepped in publicly to settle the discussion with a compelling argument: on a public blockchain, the opinion of third parties about others’ transactions “doesn’t matter at all”.
The great thing about public blockchains is that it doesn't matter one bit whether other people think your use of the blockchain is good and valuable or terrible and worthless. https://t.co/1a5Z6iAC3V
— David 'JoelKatz' Schwartz (@JoelKatz) August 14, 2026
The scenario that triggered Schwartz’s response was block 962266 of Bitcoin. Its visualization revealed that traditional monetary transfers represented an absolute minority of the available space.
NFT Inscriptions and custom scripts occupied virtually the entire block, which supporters of the failed fork immediately labeled “garbage and spam“. Far from being an anomaly, that block functioned as a manifesto from the winning side: the market categorically rejects any artificial restriction on the use of the network.
Schwartz approached the crisis from a purely mathematical perspective. His reasoning dismantles the logic of those who advocate for censorship: arguments about excessive resource consumption are only valid if that consumption is not being paid for. When a transaction pays the same proportional fee as any other using equivalent resources, the network’s economic equilibrium remains intact. There is no basis for prohibiting it.
The former Ripple executive went further and warned that any additional demand to ban transactions must be treated “with extreme skepticism”. Attempting to dictate how a blockchain can be used, he noted, is transforming it into something indistinguishable from a traditional bank, with all that implies in terms of control and exclusion.
The collapse of BIP-110 established new de facto rules for the ecosystem: Bitcoin will remain neutral as long as its resources are paid for with real money. The network does not distinguish between “valuable” and “worthless” transactions, and according to Schwartz, that neutrality is not a flaw in the design, but its most important feature.
