Luke Dashjr dismisses allegations of proposing a Bitcoin hard fork, calling it "fabricated news".

On September 25, the Bitcoin community was stirred up after The Rage published an article claiming that Luke Dashjr, a veteran programmer and maintainer of Bitcoin Knots, proposed a hard fork with a "trusted committee" (trusted multisig committee) that has the authority to review, modify the blockchain, and remove illegal data.

Dashjr immediately refuted: "I have never proposed a hard fork or anything similar. This is just a fabrication aimed at slandering and undermining the efforts to protect Bitcoin." He emphasized multiple times in the 24 hours that followed: "No, nothing has changed. No one is calling for a hard fork."

The incident has sparked a long-standing debate between two schools of thought:

• Bitcoin Knots ( of Dashjr ): implements a strict trading policy, blocking non-financial data such as Ordinals and Runes. Dashjr believes this protects monetary integrity and reduces legal risk.
• Bitcoin Core: a more accessible approach that allows non-standard data as long as it does not break consensus.

Critics view the hard fork rumors as evidence that Dashjr wants to compromise the immutability of Bitcoin. Meanwhile, supporters see this as just a "dirty trick" aimed at undermining the viewpoint of tightening data filtering.

Notably, Udi Wertheimer – co-founder of Taproot Wizards, which is associated with Ordinals ( that Dashjr opposes ) – also sided with him, calling the article a "hit piece" and "fake news." Wertheimer explained that the leaked message was merely a hypothetical discussion about using zero-knowledge proofs to help Knots nodes avoid "spam" load, not a hard fork plan at all.