Bitcoin Developers Remove Luke Dashjr as Proposal Editor After BIP-110 Fork Flops

Dashjr is no longer listed as one of the editors of Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, days after the data-limit soft fork he helped write split off the main chain and froze.

Luke Dashjr has lost his seat among the editors who control which changes get admitted to Bitcoin’s improvement proposal process. BIP 3, the document that defines that process, now lists only five editors: Bryan Bishop, Jon Atack, Mark “Murch” Erhardt, Olaoluwa Osuntokun and Ruben Somsen.

Erhardt opened the one-line pull request striking Dashjr’s name on Sunday, after recommending the removal in an email to the Bitcoin development mailing list. The change went through on Monday.

The Case Against Him

Erhardt’s email listed four problems: an editor ruling on a proposal he helped write, a thin recent workload, advocacy for a contentious fork, and communication with his fellow editors that had broken down. He said in his message to the mailing list that Dashjr “exercised his authority as a BIP Editor inconsistently with the established editorial process,” pointing to an attempt to assign BIP-110 a number before the list had discussed it, and to a merge that landed within minutes of the pull request being opened.

That merge was also, on Erhardt’s account, close to the whole of Dashjr’s recent editorial work. He wrote that Dashjr “left fewer than 1% of the BIP Editor comments in the repository since then, and the merge action of this PR was his first since May 2024,” dating the comparison to April 2024, when the group of editors was expanded.

The Fork That Froze

BIP-110 tried to cap the arbitrary data that can be written into bitcoin transactions, a practice that spread after the emergence o Ordinals inscriptions in 2023. Signaling for BIP-110 peaked at 2.53% of blocks against the 55% the proposal needed to activate. Nodes running the software began rejecting blocks that did not signal support at block 961,632, splitting off a chain that mined two blocks over roughly eight hours and then stopped. Ocean, the mining pool where Dashjr is chairman and chief technology officer, was the only pool signaling for it.

Dashjr called the removal “an abuse of power” in a post on X. He rejected the accusations themselves in a reply on the mailing list, saying he had followed the BIP process consistently for years and that Erhardt was the one who had stopped communicating. He also said he was taking a sabbatical from Ocean to work on Bitcoin and open-source projects.

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