Ripple CTO Emeritus Schwartz Fires Back at Bitcoin Spam Purists

An attempt by the radical wing of the Bitcoin community to forcibly purge the network of nonfinancial data had the opposite effect. Just days after the high-profile failure of the BIP-110 soft fork, designed to temporarily limit the amount of data bloating the network, Bitcoin was flooded with deliberately “heavy” blocks.

Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz put the final word on the debate, reminding supporters of the restrictions that, in public blockchains, someone else’s opinion of someone else’s transactions “doesn’t matter one bit.”

Why David Schwartz backs the Bitcoin fee market

The new battleground in this information war was the recent Bitcoin block 962266. Its visualization clearly shows that traditional monetary transfers were in the absolute minority. Almost all the block space was occupied by NFT inscriptions and custom scripts, which supporters of the blocked fork immediately labeled “garbage and spam.”

However, this block became a vivid manifesto of the victorious side, proving that the market is categorically opposed to artificial restrictions. This is the norm for open networks — they must operate regardless of whether others consider your actions “good and valuable or terrible and worthless,” according to David Schwartz.

As the chief architect of the XRP Ledger — a network originally created with a strong focus on commercial efficiency — Schwartz approached the Bitcoin crisis from the standpoint of pure mathematics.

This approach completely dismantles the logic of censorship advocates. Arguments about excessive resource consumption are legitimate only until that consumption is paid for. 

Once higher fees make a transaction “pay the same rate for its resources as other transactions that use comparable resources,” the network’s economic balance is fully maintained.

Schwartz urged that any further demands to ban transactions be treated “with extreme skepticism,” since attempting to dictate how a blockchain may be used turns it into something resembling a traditional bank.

The failure of BIP-110 has definitively established the new rules of the game — Bitcoin will remain neutral as long as its resources are paid for with real money.