Luke Dashjr Says Exchanges Sell 'Fake' Bitcoin (BTC) After Fork Got 2.53% Miner Support

Luke Dashjr’s ‘Fake Bitcoins’ Accusation

Bitcoin Knots developer Luke Dashjr says major exchanges are selling “fake bitcoins” to customers, days after a contested hard fork severed his BLAKE2b chain from the main Bitcoin (BTC) network on September 1. The charge sits at the center of a dispute over which ledger deserves the Bitcoin name — and, so far, the market has answered decisively against him.

The row unfolded on X. After Swan co-founder Yan Pritzker asked whether Dashjr truly believed trading platforms skip operating their own nodes, Dashjr replied that competent operators would never list the SHA-256 chain, writing in a September 4 post that platforms doing so would otherwise be selling fake bitcoins — unless, he added, it was intentional fraud. In the same thread, a follow-up post branded the SHA-256 chain “Spamcoin,” and Dashjr called on exchanges to stop advertising it as Bitcoin. He also described established venues as incompetent, accusing them of blindly following ex-miners out of the network.

writing in a September 4 posthttps://x.com/LukeDashjr/status/2095679042670202958?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

That framing rests entirely on his own view of which ledger counts. Dashjr has argued for months that spam data on the main chain constitutes an attack on the network — the same grievance that fueled the Bitcoin Ordinals controversy — a claim Ripple’s former CTO David Schwartz dismissed as nonsense. The fork itself permanently replaced SHA-256 with BLAKE2b as the chain’s proof-of-work algorithm, a change that locks out every existing ASIC rig. Before the split, Dashjr resigned as chairman and CTO of mining pool OCEAN; he now leads CONVOY Mining, giving him a direct stake in the chain he is defending. Whether his fraud thesis gains traction depends on venues that, by every observable signal, see no reason to touch the fork at all.

BIP-110 Signaling Stalls at 2.53%

The market verdict has been brutal. Not a single major exchange has listed the forked coin. One small venue opened deposits under the ticker BTCB2, where bids reached $82 earlier this week — a fraction of main-chain value — and a 131.7% bid-ask spread on that book pointed to almost no genuine demand. For comparison, our guide to the best crypto exchanges shows how far due-diligence standards at major venues sit from that listing.

Bitcoin (BTC) itself traded near $80,670 after a 3.83% gain in 24 hours, and the live spot tape shows the advance extending to roughly 4.3% over the past day — the split has barely registered on the asset’s own chart. Demand is flowing to the established market instead: US spot Bitcoin ETFs logged a $730.8 million net inflow on September 3, their largest since January.

Miner support never arrived either. Signaling for the BIP-110 fork peaked at just 2.53%, far below the 55% activation threshold, and an earlier August attempt died after producing only two blocks. Since the September 1 split, hashrate on the BLAKE2b chain has kept falling, and every unforked block widens the practical hazards that accompany any chain split — not least replay attacks, which can let a transaction broadcast on one chain be replayed on the other. Holders moving coins around the fork window face those risks regardless of which ledger they consider real.

Blockstream CEO Adam Back compressed the episode into one line: “Live by the fork, die by the fork.” Even main-chain usage metrics have softened lately — our August data showed Lightning Network capacity sliding 17.6% to 3,704 BTC — yet traders still treat the SHA-256 chain as the only Bitcoin that matters. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bybit.

BLAKE2b’s Survival Rests on Miners

Both threads point to the same conclusion. The load-bearing record here is Dashjr’s own X account: the posts we reviewed state the fraud accusation and the “Spamcoin” label in his words, and as of publication no exchange has publicly responded to them. COINOTAG’s read is that accusations do not secure a chain — committed mining power does. The wider Bitcoin ecosystem has already priced the fork at an $82 bid against a $80,670 main chain. Unless operators beyond Dashjr’s supporters keep mining BLAKE2b, the “fake bitcoins” claim will expire with the fork’s dwindling block production, leaving the node-validation debate to whatever attempt comes next.