Luke Dashjr removed as Bitcoin BIP editor after controversial BIP-110 fork stalls

Luke Dashjr, one of the key proponents of BIP-110 soft-fork attempt, has been removed from his position as an editor of such proposals for the development of the Bitcoin network.

The motion’s forwarding and subsequent carrying followed shortly after the controversial BIP-110, an attempt to temporarily restrict use of the Bitcoin network for non-financial purposes, stalled almost immediately after entering a signaling period for miners and node operators to demonstrate their support.

Dashjr, who was one of the most prominent Bitcoin developers driving the BIP-110 initiative, was accused of abusing his editorial authority in doing so, such as attempting to assign the proposal a BIP number before it had been discussed and then quickly merging an update into the repository without following due process.

“The latter is particularly notable given that Luke has otherwise made hardly any contributions to the day-to-day work of the BIP Editors since the additional editors began serving in April 2024: he 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,” Bitcoin developer Mark Erhardt wrote in a motion calling for Dashjr’s removal on Aug. 9.

Dashjr called his removal “an abuse of power,” in a post on X. He had previously described the accusations as false when the motion was first put forward.

He went on to say that he is taking a sabbatical from his role as chair and chief technology officer of mining pool Ocean to turn his “immediate focus to working Bitcoin and open-source projects to support Bitcoin.”

BIP-110 was an attempt to set up a breakaway Bitcoin chain with restrictions on storing non-financial data such as images and text, a use of the main Bitcoin network that became popular following the advent of the Ordinals protocol in 2023.

The proposal, however, never gained momentum, acquiring support from only around 2.6% of miners, a long way shy of the 55% required threshold to succeed. As a result, the forked chain ground to a halt after mining only two blocks, while the principal Bitcoin network continued on as normal.