Bitcoin's BIP Editors Remove Luke Dashjr Two Days After BIP-110 Fork Stalled

Bitcoin's BIP editors removed Luke Dashjr from the role on Monday, two days after the soft fork he championed split thousands of nodes onto a chain that has not produced a block since Aug. 8.

The BIPs repository has no written procedure for taking the role away. BIP 3, the document that governs the proposal process, lists the current editors and their duties and says nothing about how they are appointed or dismissed. Dashjr was removed by revoking his GitHub permissions and deleting one line from that list.

Bryan Bishop, one of the five remaining editors, confirmed the change on the Bitcoin Development Mailing List at 4:52 p.m. ET Monday: "The individual known as Luke Dashjr is no longer a permissioned user on the BIP content repository." Jon Atack merged pull request #2248, a one-line deletion that strikes Dashjr's name and email from BIP 3, and wrote that he had "verified that Luke no longer has editor/admin privileges in this repository." Bishop, Atack, Erhardt, Olaoluwa Osuntokun and Ruben Somsen remain.

Fewer Than 1%

Erhardt, who goes by Murch, opened the motion at 2:53 p.m. ET Sunday with four grounds: conflict of interest, minimal contribution, championing a contentious fork, and a breakdown in coordination with the other editors.

"Luke was heavily involved in the creation and implementation of BIP110, the proposal that led to the fork," Erhardt wrote. "During that process, he also exercised his authority as a BIP Editor inconsistently with the established editorial process unfairly favoring the proposal he was involved in. For example, he attempted to assign a BIP number to the draft publicly on Twitter before the proposal had been discussed on the mailing list, and he merged a PR updating the BIP within minutes of the PR being opened."

Erhardt put a number on the second charge. Since additional editors joined in April 2024, Dashjr left "fewer than 1% of the BIP Editor comments in the repository," and the BIP-110 merge was his first merge action since May 2024.

False Accusations

Dashjr replied 49 minutes later, in five sentences.

"These are false accusations. I have followed the BIP process consistently for years. Your novice opinions alone do not establish new processes," he wrote. "You are the one who stopped communicating, not I. You are the one who should be removed."

He had not addressed the removal itself publicly as of Monday evening.

Support in the thread came from Osuntokun, a fellow BIP editor, from Bitcoin Core contributors Matt Corallo, Antoine Poinsot and Anthony Towns, and from Jonas Nick, a maintainer of the libsecp256k1 cryptographic library. Osuntokun wrote that Dashjr "used his position as a BIP editor to fast track the proposal anyway, assigning it a number out of band," and that the fork creates "a clear conflict of interest." Poinsot listed four earlier disputes with dated sources, including a 2021 pull request in which Dashjr, then sole maintainer of the BIPs repository, stalled the inclusion of Taproot activation parameters he disagreed with. Dashjr has been at the center of the dispute over Bitcoin Core's OP_RETURN changes since last year, the fight that produced BIP-110.

Nick cited seven of Dashjr's X posts: three in which he said BIP-110 "is Bitcoin," had consensus and was certain to activate, three in which he called it "zero risk," and one in which he called Erhardt a liar. The proposal peaked at 2.53% of blocks signaling in a difficulty period, against the 55% it needed.

Towns opened his message with "Very overdue," and wrote that a BIP editor "actively promoting a minority fork as the real Bitcoin while lying about the risks of such an approach and calling everyone who disagrees with him a liar and/or a pedophile is completely untenable."

Jameson Lopp, co-founder and chief security officer of self-custody firm Casa, wrote that the case "comes down to reputation" and noted the absence of any governance policy. "This isn't a democracy and I have no vote," he wrote. "But it seems to me that if the other BIP Editors are uninterested in continuing to work with Luke, they are under no obligation to leave privileged access open for him to potentially abuse."

The tally on the pull request was informal: more than a dozen thumbs-up reactions and three comments reading "ACK," the repository's shorthand for approval, from SatsAndSports, jlopp and caesrcd. "Looks like the Ayes had it," Erhardt wrote.

Two Weeks To Answer

Antoine Riard, a Bitcoin protocol developer, backed the outcome and objected to the speed.

Riard proposed that all existing editors state their positions publicly, that contributors to the repository be given a say, and that Dashjr get "at least 2 weeks or even a full month" to answer the charges point by point, with a temporary suspension in the interim. He also noted the timing: "we're in the middle of the month of August, at a period where people can be in vacations."

Riard also asked that BIP 3 be amended to state that editors have "an explicit duty of neutrality," and that under it they "should not engage in the promotion of contentious fork, even under one of their other hats."

The removal took about 26 hours. Somsen, the fifth remaining editor, did not post to the thread.

Michael Tidwell, who backed the removal, made a similar point about process. "It would be better to step down yourself than get forced out through this informal process," he wrote to Dashjr, thanking him for "the years of hard work."

Sabbatical From Ocean

Four minutes before Bishop's confirmation, Dashjr posted that he is stepping back from Ocean, where the pool's site lists him as chairman and chief technology officer.

"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," he wrote. "I believe this is the best use of my time and is in the best interests of Bitcoin and Bitcoin's long-term health."

Ocean was the only pool that signaled for BIP-110 in the final period before the split. All 51 signaling blocks between heights 959,616 and 961,631 came from Ocean, according to block data from mempool.space. The pool has since returned its default stratum endpoint to non-BIP-110 work and has published nothing about Dashjr's sabbatical.

Signaling At Zero

The chain enforcing BIP-110 is still stuck at height 961,633, where it stopped on Aug. 8. Roughnecks, the self-organized group that mined the fork's only two blocks, acknowledged the stall on Monday while describing the enforcing side as Bitcoin. Bitcoin itself passed 961,925 at 22:02 UTC Monday, a gap of 292 blocks.

Signaling has stopped entirely. The bip110monitor.com dashboard, which reads block versions from mempool.space, shows no block setting bit 4 since the current difficulty period opened at height 961,632, after a peak of 51 blocks, or 2.53%, in the period that ended there. The proposal needs 55% in a single period.

Bitcoin traded at $64,002 late Monday, down 1.9% over 24 hours and up 0.8% on the week, according to CoinGecko. Neither the fork nor the removal moved the price.

Dashjr remains lead maintainer of Bitcoin Knots, the node implementation that shipped the BIP-110 rules in its 20260508 builds and stranded the nodes that installed them. Monday's removal does not touch that role.