If this is accurate, that’s a pretty serious claim. A backward-incompatible change after 13 years isn’t something you do casually.

The interesting part to me is whether this is actually a security response or the start of a much bigger shift in how Bitcoin handles threats to the network.

d66f440b61

06bc1a977d

On August 8th, most former miners abandoned Bitcoin en masse and together with other bad actors have been falsely promoting a new altcoin as "Bitcoin". This is the biggest attack on the Bitcoin network to date, and brought the network to a crawl.

Mitigating this attack unfortunately requires a backward-incompatible protocol change, included in this release. It has been 13 years since the last such change, and several other security issues had been deferred; where practical, those have also been fixed at the same time.

bitcoin

> On August 8th, most former miners abandoned Bitcoin en masse and together with other bad actors have been falsely promoting a new altcoin as "Bitcoin". This is the biggest attack on the Bitcoin network to date, and brought the network to a crawl.
>
> Mitigating this attack unfortunately requires a backward-incompatible protocol change, included in this release. It has been 13 years since the last such change, and several other security issues had been deferred; where practical, those have also been fixed at the same time.
>
> [**...read more at github.com**](https://github.com/bitcoinknots/bitcoin/releases/tag/v29.4.1.knots20260508)