Luke Dashjr Removed as BIP Editor 26 Hours After Removal Motion Filed
Bitcoin's BIP editors removed Luke Dashjr on Aug. 10, 2026, just 26 hours after a removal motion landed on the dev mailing list. The fork he championed got 2.6% miner support, stalled after two blocks, and is now formally closed. Dashjr calls it an abuse of power. The governance gap it exposed is
Bitcoin's BIP editors stripped Dashjr of his editorial role in under a day. The fork he championed never had a chance.
Key takeaways
- Bitcoin BIP editors removed Luke Dashjr on Aug. 10, 2026, approximately 26 hours after Mark Erhardt filed a removal motion on the Bitcoin Development Mailing List, citing conflict of interest and procedural violations tied to BIP-110.
- The fork Dashjr championed attracted roughly 2.53% miner support against a 55% threshold, stalled after two blocks, and is now marked Closed in the BIP repository. All 51 signaling blocks came from Ocean pool, where Dashjr serves as Chairman and CTO.
- BIP 3 contains no written procedure for appointing or removing editors. The removal was executed by revoking GitHub permissions and merging a one-line PR deleting Dashjr's name. Dashjr called it "an abuse of power" and announced a sabbatical from Ocean minutes later.
Bitcoin's BIP editors removed Luke Dashjr from his editorial role on Aug. 10, 2026, roughly 26 hours after developer Mark "Murch" Erhardt filed a formal motion on the Bitcoin Development Mailing List. The removal was confirmed by Bryan Bishop on the same list, then executed by revoking Dashjr's GitHub permissions and merging PR #2248, a one-line deletion of his name from BIP 3.
The action followed the near-immediate failure of BIP-110, a proposal Dashjr championed that would have temporarily restricted non-financial data storage on Bitcoin. The fork attracted approximately 2.53% miner signaling, well short of the 55% threshold required for adoption, and stalled after producing only two blocks.
What Dashjr Did and Why the Editors Moved
Erhardt's motion cited four grounds: conflict of interest stemming from procedural favoritism on BIP-110; minimal contribution to editorial work (fewer than 1% of BIP editor comments since April 2024); championing a contentious proposal that evolved toward a hard fork; and a breakdown in coordination with other editors.
The specific procedural violations were pointed. Dashjr publicly assigned BIP-110 a number on X before the proposal had been discussed on the mailing list. He then merged a related PR within minutes of it opening. That merge was, per Erhardt, "his first since May 2024."
Erhardt's exact framing: "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."
Dashjr rejected every count. Posting on X, he called the removal "just an abuse of power by Core," described the accusations as false, and said the mailing list is "completely captured and corrupt." Two minutes after Bishop confirmed the removal at 20:52 UTC on Aug. 10, Dashjr posted that he is "taking a sabbatical from OCEAN as Chairman and CTO" to focus on Bitcoin and open-source work.
The Governance Gap Nobody Wants to Talk About
Here is the recursive irony worth sitting with: Dashjr was removed, in part, for not following process. The removal itself was carried out through a process that does not exist in writing anywhere in BIP 3.
BIP 3 lists editors and their duties. It says nothing about how editors are appointed or dismissed. The mechanism used here was a mailing-list temperature check and a GitHub permissions revoke, the same informal social-consensus apparatus that governs Bitcoin development at large. That apparatus moved fast, roughly 26 hours from motion to execution, and it produced a defensible outcome given the facts.
But it is trust-based consensus acting quickly, not rule-of-law governance.
That distinction matters. The BIP-110 signaling failure was clean: miners and node operators rejected the proposal on its merits, and the minority chain died in two blocks. The editorial removal is murkier, because the authority used to execute it is the same informal kind Dashjr is accused of abusing. The remaining editors (Bishop, Jon Atack, Erhardt, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, and Ruben Somsen) can reasonably argue they acted in good faith. What they cannot argue is that they followed a codified process, because one does not exist.
The TFTC falsifiable thesis: Bitcoin's governance is stress-tested but self-correcting. BIP-110 failed because almost nobody wanted it. The network didn't change. The fork died. That's the system working.
The trigger that would disprove it: a future proposal with genuinely broad community support gets suppressed, or its proponent is removed through the same informal mechanism before miner and node signaling can run its course. That would indicate capture, not correction.
What to Watch at Ocean and Beyond
All 51 blocks that signaled for BIP-110, mined in the period ending at height 961,631, came from Ocean pool, per block data from mempool.space. Ocean has since returned its default stratum endpoint to standard, non-BIP-110 work. Dashjr's sabbatical announcement came two minutes after his removal was confirmed. That timing is not coincidental, and the leadership vacuum at Ocean is worth tracking.
Dashjr is no longer a BIP gatekeeper, but he retains maintainership of Bitcoin Knots, the node implementation that shipped BIP-110's consensus rules. Any future attempt to revive a minority chain runs through that software.
On Aug. 1, developer Chris Guida rebased proof-of-work change code originally written by Dashjr onto the current version of Bitcoin Knots, describing it as a contingency with no activation date set. BIP-110 is formally closed. Whether the underlying dispute is closed is a different question.
The network worked. A contentious fork with 2.53% miner support died in two blocks and the chain moved on. Bitcoin's conservatism held.
The governance layer around how BIPs are managed is now visibly informal in a way that was easy to ignore before this week. That gap will matter again when a better-coordinated proposal arrives.
Sources
Frequently Asked Questions
BIP editors are maintainers who assign numbers to Bitcoin Improvement Proposals and shepherd them through the editorial process. The role is meant to be administrative: editors do not determine whether a proposal gains adoption. Miners and node operators decide that through signaling. Controlling the numbering and merge process does, however, give editors real influence over which proposals gain visibility and on what timeline, which is why the conflict-of-interest accusation against Dashjr carries weight.
BIP-110 is formally marked Closed in the repository. The minority chain stalled after two blocks and has not advanced. Dashjr retains maintainership of Bitcoin Knots, the node software that enforced BIP-110's rules, so the technical infrastructure for a revival exists. Any renewed attempt would still need to overcome the same fundamental problem: approximately 97.47% of miners did not signal support the first time.
Per BIP 3, there is no formal mechanism. The document describes editors' duties but specifies nothing about appointment or dismissal procedures. Dashjr was removed through a mailing-list consensus motion and a GitHub permissions revoke.
He had controlled BIP numbering since 2011 and was the sole editor until April 2024 reforms added additional editors. The absence of a written removal clause is not a new problem; this episode simply made it impossible to ignore.
