Veteran Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr has been removed as an editor of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, or BIPs, after a dispute tied to the stalled BIP-110 soft fork, according to Decrypt as cited in ABMedia’s report.
Motion filed by Mark Erhardt
The move was initiated by fellow BIP editor Mark Erhardt, better known in the community as Murch. On Aug. 9, he submitted a motion through a pull request that removed Dashjr’s name from the editor list in BIP 3.
Erhardt gave four reasons. First, he said Dashjr had a conflict of interest in exercising editorial authority over BIP-110, a proposal he was directly involved in, and had "deviated from established process" while treating it unfairly in its favor. That included trying to assign BIP-110 a number before discussion on the mailing list and merging the pull request within minutes of it being opened. Second, Erhardt said Dashjr had made very limited contributions, with less than 1% of all editorial comments since April 2024. Third, he argued that the soft fork Dashjr had pushed now appeared to be turning into a hard fork, effectively breaking away from Bitcoin’s development ecosystem. Fourth, he said trust among the editors had collapsed.
BIP-110 failed to gain support
BIP-110 sought to temporarily block non-financial data, including Ordinals inscriptions, from entering Bitcoin transactions. Miner signaling reached only 51 out of 2,016 blocks, about 2.53%, far below the 55% activation threshold.
The minority chain that split off mined just two blocks over eight hours before stalling. Michael Saylor also said that 99.85% of hash rate remained on Bitcoin’s main chain. ABMedia noted that Chain News had previously reported the soft fork was struggling because support was insufficient.
Dashjr disputes removal
Dashjr has pushed back against the decision on X, arguing that "Core should not have any control over the BIPs repository." He also rejected the view that the majority chain is Bitcoin and referred to it as "Bpedo."
On Aug. 10, he said he would take an extended leave from Ocean pool to focus on Bitcoin and open-source projects.