Reading · Christine D. Kim

Good morning,

Today, I’m discussing the removal of Bitcoin’s longest-serving BIP editor, Luke Dashjr, after ten years of service. It’s an unprecedented event for the Bitcoin developer community. I explain who and what prompted this action in the main story below.

Regarding Bitcoin Core development, the main update is that, as anticipated, the BIP-110 soft fork did not impact Core users or the Bitcoin protocol. More on what Core developers are focusing on for their next major release, v32, and what users can expect from the upcoming release further below in today’s newsletter.

As a note to subscribers, I had a lovely time vacationing up in Alaska over the past two weeks. Thank you for your patience while I was away. I’m back now, so you can expect my updates on Bitcoin and Ethereum development in your inboxes on their regular cadence starting this week.

While I don’t have any souvenirs to send you from my trip, here’s a photo I took of the beautiful Bryn Mawr Glacier.

As you can tell, I didn’t have much opportunity on my vacation to touch grass, but I did touch ice- glacier ice- and it was very cool. ;)

Now, let’s get into our main story for today.

Yours truly,

Christine D. Kim

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Protocol Watch

On Monday, August 10, Bitcoin’s longest-serving Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) editor, Luke Dashjr, was forcefully removed from his role after 10 years of service.

The removal was initiated a day after Mark “Murch” Erhardt, cofounder of Localhost Research and long-time Bitcoin Core contributor, emailed the Bitcoin Development Mailing List with a motion to formally remove Dashjr from the position of BIP editor.

Excluding Dashjr, there are now five individuals who have merge access to the BIP GitHub repository, the main repository for tracking proposals to change Bitcoin Core code. Murch is one of them. He was added in 2024, along with four others, to help clear a backlog of BIP editing work that had grown to more than 130 open pull requests (PRs).

When proposing the expansion of BIP editors, Ava Chow, a Bitcoin Core maintainer who works at Blockstream, described what the new editors would do in the following way:

These people would have the same permissions and responsibilities that Luke has, i.e. can assign BIP numbers, merge PRs adding new BIPs, merge PRs to fix existing BIPs, and all other responsibilities as described in BIP 2.

The 2024 expansion of the BIPs editor group to six total editors markedly improved BIP activity, which I covered in more detail in BTC Before Light Issue #00.

Up until his removal, Dashjr was the longstanding editor in the group. He has been editing BIPs since 2016, and he maintained the BIPs repository alone for a long stretch between 2016 and 2021.

The recent motion, which was approved on Monday, to remove him was prompted by his involvement in the failed BIP-110 soft fork that stalled last week with only 2.53% miner support.

Murch also cited a lack of work and communication as grounds for removal. He wrote that since the additional editors began serving in April 2024, Dashjr has left fewer than 1% of the editor comments in the repository.

On communication, Murch wrote:

Communication between Luke and other BIP Editors had already broken down last year, following a discussion about his attempt to side-step the process by prematurely assigning a BIP number out of band.

The motion to remove Dashjr from his role as BIP editor generated wide support from the Bitcoin developer community, which is why it was approved promptly after it was created.

Unsurprisingly, Dashjr responded to the motion himself, refuting it and claiming accusations of his negligent behavior are false:

These are false accusations. I have followed the BIP process consistently for years. Your novice opinions alone do not establish new processes. You are the one who stopped communicating, not I. You are the one who should be removed.

Others in the community were quick to voice their support for Murch's motion. The individuals who publicly supported the motion were: Olaoluwa Osuntokun, chief technology officer (CTO) of Lightning Labs and a fellow BIP editor; Matt Corallo, a Bitcoin Core contributor at Spiral; Jameson Lopp, co-founder and chief security officer of Casa; Jonas Nick, a Bitcoin researcher at Blockstream; Antoine Poinsot, a Bitcoin Core contributor at Chaincode Labs; among others.

Poinsot responded in the email thread saying that the removal of Dashjr as BIP editor was “long overdue.”

One concern raised about Murch’s motion was that there is no formal governance process for removing someone against their will. Lopp, who supported the motion, wrote:

This is unprecedented because there is, to my knowledge, no formal governance structure or policy around management of BIP Editors.

Antoine Riard, an independent Bitcoin developer who has on multiple occasions been temporarily removed from both the Bitcoin and Lightning GitHub organizations for repeated harassment against other contributors, said that while it would be ideal for Dashjr to remove himself from the BIP editors list, in lieu of voluntary action, the developer community should make other provisions to ensure that the forceful removal of Dashjr happens on “bright lines,” i.e., clear guidelines.

Riard recommended formalities such as requiring every current BIP editor to publicly state their position on this motion with reasoning, and giving Dashjr at least two weeks to defend his position.

Riard also proposed amending the BIP editorial process document, BIP-3, to explicitly ban behavior exhibited by Dashjr in recent months. Riard wrote:

I would strongly suggest to amend the BIP-3 document to underscore that editors have an explicit duty of neutrality, and that under this duty they should not engage in the promotion of contentious fork, even under one of their other hats.

Despite Lopp and Riard’s concerns about the novelty of forcibly removing a BIP editor from their role, Dashjr's privileges as BIP editor were officially revoked as of yesterday, August 10.

Following the removal, a motion to close BIP-110 and signal the proposal’s failure to garner sufficient support from the Bitcoin community for activation was approved by the other BIP editors shortly thereafter.

Then, also on the same day, August 10, Dashjr announced that he is taking a sabbatical from his position as Chairman and CTO of OCEAN, a Bitcoin mining pool, to focus on “open-source projects to support Bitcoin.” It is unclear what exactly Dashjr plans to focus on as it relates to Bitcoin, but some sources say that he is planning a hard fork of the protocol:

Bitcoin News@BitcoinNewsCom

BIP-110 DEVS PLAN PROOF-OF-WORK CHANGE FOR SEPTEMBER 1 FORK AS LUKE DASHJR IS REMOVED FROM PERMISSIONED USER OF BIP CONTENT REPOSITORY Luke Dashjr says a developer meeting “went well,” with plans moving forward for a Bitcoin hard fork featuring a new proof-of-work algorithm.

Bryan Bishop @kanzure

Fyi, the individual known as Luke Dashjr is no longer a permissioned user of the BIP content repository.

8:34 PM · Aug 10, 2026 · 9.68K Views

10 Replies · 10 Reposts · 53 Likes

In the grand scheme of Bitcoin development, the removal of an inactive BIP editor is pretty minor, as is the approval to close out a BIP that has already failed to gain meaningful support from Bitcoin stakeholders.

Both pull requests, PR 2248, which removes Dashjr from BIP-3's list of editors, and PR 2245, which updates BIP-110’s status from Complete to Closed, are formalities that simply reaffirm what has already been evident from the events of the past few months.

They underscore the fact that Luke Dashjr is no longer a contributor to Bitcoin development that others take seriously or trust to offer meaningful contributions, nor is BIP-110 a proposal that the Bitcoin community supports in any meaningful capacity.

Most in the community already knew this, but in an open-source project like Bitcoin, a merged pull request is about as far as developers can go in making something official.

The next major Bitcoin Core version, v32, is 79% complete and scheduled for release by October 10, 2026. (GitHub)
Two new Bitcoin Core minor releases, v30.3 and v29.4, are now available. (Bitcoin Development Mailing List)
There is also a new version of libsecp256k1, i.e., the cryptographic library for all elliptic curve operations on Bitcoin. The latest release, v0.8.0, incorporates changes from BIP-352, Silent Payments. (Bitcoin Development Mailing List)
Transcript of last Thursday’s August 6 Bitcoin Core Developers meeting. (Chaincode)
Summary of Bitcoin Core development activity from July 27 to August 2. (This Week in Bitcoin)
A monitor tracking the status of the BIP-110 Bitcoin soft fork. At the time of writing, the monitor shows the BIP-110 chain has stalled due to a lack of miner support. (bip110.orange.surf)
An overview of the recently finalized feature, PR #34628, in Bitcoin Core v32, that fixes years of CPU and bandwidth problems caused by mempool spam and transaction floods. (Delving Bitcoin)
New Bitcoin Inquisition release, v29.4, activating BIP-446, TEMPLATEHASH. As background, Bitcoin Inquisition releases are test versions of Bitcoin Core that implement new features not yet live in the main Core versions. (Delving Bitcoin)

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Luke Dashjr, Bitcoin's longest-serving BIP editor, is out

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