Bitcoin BIP Editor Murch Seeks Luke Dashjr’s Removal Over BIP-110 Dispute

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Bitcoin Core developer and BIP Editor Mark “Murch” Erhardt has asked the Bitcoin Development Mailing List to remove fellow editor Luke Dashjr, who has controlled the numbering of Bitcoin Improvement Proposals since 2011. The recommendation comes a day after a contentious soft fork proposal Dashjr pushed through collapsed at roughly 2.5% miner support.

Erhardt confirmed the recommendation directly.

“Since it will likely land here on Twitter soon anyway: I have recommended the removal of Luke Dashjr from the BIP Editors to the mailing list,” he wrote.

The tweet turns weeks of public dispute over BIP-110, a proposal to restrict how much non-financial data can be embedded in Bitcoin transactions, into a formal, on-record recommendation.

Why editors want him out

Erhardt’s stated objection is procedural. He said Dashjr assigned BIP-110 a number and merged it into the repository “bypassing the coordination and review that typically accompanies changes of this magnitude.”

The objection carries more weight than it would have before April 2024, when Bitcoin’s BIP process added four co-editors to end Dashjr’s more than decade-long sole control. Bitcoin Core contributor Ava Chow explained the reasoning at the time, Luke was the only person who could merge anything into the BIP repository.

The workload had become unmanageable for one volunteer. The fix Erhardt himself proposed that year was straightforward: give every editor equal footing.

“All editors share the same privileges, especially that any editor may assign numbers to BIPs,” he wrote on the mailing list in March 2024.

That same design is what let BIP-110 move forward the way Erhardt now says it did. Five editors holding equal, independent authority solves a bottleneck problem. A backlog of more than 130 open pull requests and a departing co-editor around the same time likely made that gap easier to fall into.

How BIP-110 fell apart

BIP-110’s mandatory signaling window opened at block 961,632, around August 9. Nodes running Bitcoin Knots, the alternative software Dashjr maintains that was enforcing BIP-110’s rule, were set to reject blocks from miners who hadn’t signaled support.

Miner backing never got close to the 55% needed: signaling sat around 2.5%, roughly 40 of 1,561 blocks, in the run-up to activation.

Mining pool Roughnecks mined two blocks, 961,632 and 961,633, on the resulting minority chain before asking other miners to stop building on it “under the current algorithm.” Bitcoin’s main chain opened an 18-block lead within about a day. That gap had stretched to more than 80 blocks by the time MicroStrategy chairman Michael Saylor weighed in, putting the main chain’s share of network hashpower at roughly 99.85%.

Dashjr pushed back on the allegations less than an hour after Murch’s mailing-list post. As of Aug. 10, the removal PR remained open, while the current BIP-3 document still listed Dashjr among its six BIP Editors.

Dashjr has defended BIP-110 on the merits repeatedly in recent weeks, saying in comments attributed to his own account that it was “too late to cancel BIP110,” and, separately, that abandoning the rule would itself amount to a contentious hard fork.