In brief
- Luke Dashjr has been removed as a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal editor and no longer holds editor or admin access to the BIPs repository.
- Fellow editor Mark "Murch" Erhardt filed the motion on August 9, citing a conflict of interest over BIP-110, minimal contribution to the role, and a breakdown in coordination between editors.
- Dashjr has continued to dispute the outcome and said on Monday he was taking a sabbatical from mining pool Ocean.
Luke Dashjr has lost his role as a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal editor, days after the soft fork he championed split off a chain that mined two blocks and stopped.
Fellow editor Mark Erhardt, who goes by Murch, put the motion to the Bitcoin Development Mailing List on August 9 and opened a pull request the same day as what he called a sample implementation of it.
Erhardt gave four grounds, arguing first that Dashjr had exercised editorial authority "inconsistently with the established editorial process unfairly favoring the proposal he was involved in," pointing to an attempt to assign BIP-110 a number publicly on X before it had been discussed on the mailing list, and to a merge completed within minutes of the pull request opening.
He also said Dashjr had left "fewer than 1% of the BIP Editor comments" in the repository since additional editors joined in April 2024, and that the disputed merge was his first since May 2024. Championing a soft fork that "now appears to evolve into a hard fork" amounted to "a complete departure from the Bitcoin development ecosystem," he wrote, adding that trust and coordination with the other editors had broken down.
A role with no exit
The request itself proposes deleting a single line, striking Dashjr's name from BIP 3, the document that lists the editors. Backing for it has been registered in thumbs-up reactions and comments on the pull request.
Dashjr has kept arguing the point on X since, writing that "Core isn't supposed to have ANY control of the BIPs repo." He still refuses to treat the majority chain as Bitcoin, calling it "Bpedo" and arguing that it is “guaranteed to fail.”
He said on Monday that he was taking a sabbatical from Ocean, the mining pool that lists him as chairman and chief technology officer, adding that he would “turn my immediate focus to working on Bitcoin and open-source projects to support Bitcoin.”
