A dispute over who controls Bitcoin’s improvement process has spilled into the open, with a serving BIP Editor formally proposing the removal of one of Bitcoin’s most prominent and polarizing developers.
On August 10, Mark “Murch” Erhardt filed a motion to the Bitcoin development mailing list recommending that Luke Dashjr be removed from his position as a BIP Editor. The move is a recommendation for the editors and community to consider, not a completed removal.
The motion lands days after the failure of BIP-110, the contentious anti-“spam” soft fork closely associated with Dashjr, giving the governance clash an unusually sharp backdrop.
What the Motion Alleges
BIP Editors are the maintainers who assign numbers to Bitcoin Improvement Proposals and shepherd them through a documented editorial process; the role is meant to be largely administrative. In his motion, Erhardt argued that Dashjr had exceeded and misused that role, laying out four grounds.
First, he alleged conflict of interest: that during the BIP-110 process, Dashjr “exercised his authority as a BIP Editor inconsistently with the established editorial process unfairly favoring the proposal he was involved in,” including attempting to assign a BIP number via a post on X before the proposal had been discussed on the mailing list and merging a related pull request “within minutes” of it being opened.
Second, he pointed to minimal contribution, saying Dashjr had made “fewer than 1% of the BIP Editor comments” since additional editors joined in April 2024, with the disputed merge his first since May 2024.
Third, he argued that Dashjr’s championing of a contentious soft fork now “appears to evolve into a hard fork” represents “a complete departure from the Bitcoin development ecosystem.”
Fourth, he said “trust, communication, and coordination with the other BIP Editors have broken down.”
Dashjr’s Response
Dashjr rejected the motion in strong terms. In a post on X, he called the grounds “false accusations,” wrote that he had “followed the BIP process consistently for years,” and dismissed Erhardt’s standing to reinterpret it: “Your novice opinions alone do not establish new processes.”
He turned the communication charge back on Erhardt—”You are the one who stopped communicating, not I”—and countered with his own motion: “You are the one who should be removed.” Dashjr also claimed his reply to the mailing list “will likely be censored,” describing the list as “completely captured and corrupt”—an allegation that the governance process itself is compromised.
The Substantive Disagreement
Beneath the personal clash is a genuine dispute over what a BIP Editor is supposed to be: a neutral clerk or a gatekeeper with judgment. A defender of Dashjr, posting as Secure Sovereign and amplified by Dashjr, argued that the “championing a contentious soft fork” charge applies a political criterion to an administrative role, noting that BIP-1 and BIP-2 instruct editors that they “will not unreasonably deny a proposal.”
The same defender flagged an irony in the credentials: Dashjr authored BIP-2, the process document that governed BIP editing for nine years, while Erhardt authored its replacement, BIP-3, which “explicitly narrowed the judgment calls assigned to the editor role.” By that reading, “the process was rewritten to narrow Luke’s discretion, and now Luke is being removed for exercising discretion.”
Whatever one makes of the merits, Dashjr’s standing in Bitcoin is not in question: he is among the longest-tenured contributors in the project’s history, having founded the Eligius mining pool, written BFGMiner, and maintained Bitcoin Knots, the alternative node software central to the BIP-110 effort. He is also CTO of the OCEAN mining pool.
The BIP-110 Trigger
The timing is inseparable from the fork. BIP-110, the “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork,” sought to restrict arbitrary data such as inscriptions in Bitcoin blocks and required 55% miner support to activate. According to the BIP-110 Monitor, it drew roughly 2.5%. When a minority chain split off around block 961,632 on August 8, the pseudonymous miner “Roughnecks”—operating via OCEAN pool—produced only two blocks, heights 961,632 and 961,633, before the effort collapsed and Roughnecks disbanded the next day, with the breakaway chain stranded far behind the main network.
Dashjr characterized the outcome as “an attack from hostile miners,” while figures including Michael Saylor and Adam Back had spent weeks arguing the proposal lacked economic consensus. A proof-of-work hard-fork contingency, floated by supporters as a next step, is the “hard fork” Erhardt’s motion references.
Why It Matters
Public motions to remove a BIP Editor are rare, and this one is a revealing window into how Bitcoin governs itself absent any central authority—through mailing lists, documented processes, and the reputations of individual maintainers.
It also crystallizes a fault line that predates BIP-110: the years-long tension between the Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots camps over spam filtering, OP_RETURN limits, and how much editorial discretion the improvement process should tolerate.
Erhardt’s closing warning to the mailing list frames the stakes plainly for the editors weighing it; his critics frame it as a purge of a dissenting voice. Which reading prevails will be decided not by a vote of the wider community but by the small group of maintainers the process entrusts—the very concentration of authority now at the center of the fight. As of publication, the motion remains under discussion, with no decision reached.
Also Read: Saylor Says Bitcoin Worked as Designed as BIP-110 Stalls at 0.15% Hash
