Luke Dashjr Steps Back from Ocean Chairman and CTO Roles, Shifts Focus to BIP-110 Fork Development

Odaily News: Jack Dorsey-backed Bitcoin mining pool Ocean co-founder, Chairman, and CTO Luke Dashjr has announced he is temporarily stepping away from these roles to focus on Bitcoin and open-source project development. Ocean's communications lead, Bitcoin Mechanic, has also announced a temporary departure. Both have stated this is a temporary leave of absence, not a permanent resignation.

The BIP-110 minority chain only produced two blocks after splitting at block height 961,632, and subsequently stalled due to inheriting Bitcoin's massive 127,480 billion difficulty level combined with a low share of SHA-256d hashrate. Bitcoin Knots developers are now preparing a hard fork that plans to reset the PoW algorithm, adjust the block header structure, and add replay protection.

Developers are considering selecting the new PoW algorithm from BLAKE2b-256, SHA3x, BLAKE2s, Scrypt, BLAKE3x2, and Eaglesong, utilizing a commit-reveal mechanism, with the algorithm determined by the next block produced after 14:00 UTC the following day. Dashjr, Kyle, and Chris Guida are respectively responsible for block header and PoW adjustments, replay protection, and RDTS adaptation work. BIP-110 shares transaction history with Bitcoin, and developers believe changes such as transaction signature modifications are necessary to prevent Bitcoin transactions from being considered valid on the minority chain. The Bitcoin community has criticized the fork for only producing two blocks so far, noting that while nodes can execute custom rules, this does not incentivize users, miners, exchanges, or enterprises to migrate to this chain. (Bitcoin News)