Luke Dashjr Removed as BIP Editor After BIP-110 Bitcoin Fork Stalls
Key Takeaways
- •Luke Dashjr was removed as a BIP editor on August 9 after Mark Erhardt filed a motion citing four grounds including conflict of interest and minimal contribution to the repository.
- •The BIP-110 soft fork Dashjr championed, which aimed to bar non-financial data like Ordinals inscriptions from Bitcoin, peaked at only 2.53% miner support before its split-off chain halted after mining just two blocks.
- •Dashjr disputes his removal and refuses to recognize the majority chain as Bitcoin, referring to it as guaranteed to fail.
- •Dashjr announced a sabbatical from his roles as Chairman and CTO of Ocean Mining Pool to focus on open-source Bitcoin projects.
- •Michael Saylor noted that 99.85% of hashpower remained with the majority Bitcoin chain, consistent with Bitcoin's history of minority chain splits failing to gain traction.
Luke Dashjr has been removed as a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) editor and no longer holds editor or admin access to the BIPs repository, following a motion filed by fellow editor Mark "Murch" Erhardt on August 9. The removal is notable because BIP editors serve as volunteer gatekeepers of Bitcoin's open standards process — they assign proposal numbers, verify formatting, and ensure proposals are discussed before being merged into the repository. They do not control Bitcoin's codebase or consensus rules, but their role carries implicit trust within a development culture that has historically resisted formal governance structures.
The decision comes days after the soft fork Dashjr championed — BIP-110 — split off a chain that mined just two blocks before coming to a halt.
The Motion and Its Four Grounds
Erhardt submitted the motion to the Bitcoin Development Mailing List on August 9 and opened a pull request the same day, describing it as a sample implementation. He cited four grounds for Dashjr's removal:
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Conflict of interest: Erhardt argued that Dashjr had exercised editorial authority "inconsistently with the established editorial process unfairly favoring the proposal he was involved in." He pointed to Dashjr's attempt to publicly assign BIP-110 a number on X before the proposal had been discussed on the mailing list, as well as a merge completed within minutes of a pull request opening.
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Minimal contribution: Dashjr had left "fewer than 1% of the BIP Editor comments" in the repository since additional editors joined in April 2024. The disputed merge was his first since May 2024.
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Departure from Bitcoin development: Championing a soft fork that "now appears to evolve into a hard fork" constituted "a complete departure from the Bitcoin development ecosystem," Erhardt wrote.
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Breakdown of coordination: Trust and coordination between Dashjr and the other editors had broken down entirely.
Mechanics of Removal
The pull request itself is minimal in scope, proposing to delete a single line that lists Dashjr's name from BIP 3, the document that enumerates the editors. Support for the motion has been registered through thumbs-up reactions and comments on the pull request.
Dashjr's Response
Dashjr has continued to dispute the outcome on X (@LukeDashjr), writing that "Core isn't supposed to have ANY control of the BIPs repo." He refuses to recognize the majority chain as Bitcoin, referring to it as "Bpedo" and arguing that it is "guaranteed to fail."
On Monday, Dashjr announced he was taking a sabbatical from Ocean, the mining pool where he serves as Chairman and Chief Technology Officer. Ocean launched in late 2023 with a focus on decentralized, miner-controlled block construction and had positioned itself as aligned with Dashjr's vision of keeping Bitcoin focused on financial transactions.
I am taking a sabbatical from OCEAN as Chairman and CTO and will turn my immediate focus to working on Bitcoin and open-source projects to support Bitcoin. I believe this is the best use of my time and is in the best interests of Bitcoin and Bitcoin's long-term health.
— Luke Dashjr (@LukeDashjr), August 10, 2026
BIP-110 and the Failed Activation
BIP-110 sought to temporarily bar non-financial data — such as Ordinals inscriptions — from Bitcoin transactions. The proposal emerged from one of the most polarizing debates in Bitcoin's recent history: whether the network should accommodate non-financial use cases like NFTs and tokenized assets, or whether these represent spam that bloats the blockchain and crowds out payment activity. Support for the proposal peaked at 51 of 2,016 blocks during the signalling period before the split, amounting to just 2.53% — far short of the 55% threshold required for activation.
According to BIP110 Monitor, not a single block has signalled for the proposal since mandatory signalling began at block 961,632.
Among the proposal's most prominent critics, Strategy's Michael Saylor tweeted that 99.85% of hashpower remained with Bitcoin, having previously laid out a detailed case against BIP-110. The overwhelming hashpower retention on the majority chain is consistent with Bitcoin's track record: network splits that produce viable minority chains are extremely rare, and previous attempts — such as the 2017 SegWit2x episode — have similarly failed to gain miner support.
