Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr, who backed the failed Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-110, has been removed from his position as an editor of such proposals for the development of the Bitcoin network.
The decision, voted on by other Bitcoin developers, was posted on the BIP Github Sunday. The BIP Github page, separate from Bitcoin Core’s repository, is where developers can make proposals to change Bitcoin.
Dashjr called the decision “an abuse of power by Core,” adding: “They have no authority to do so.”
This is just an abuse of power by Core. They have no authority to do so.
The motion read: “Over the past several years, Luke has been at the center of many contentious disputes within the Bitcoin ecosystem, and this week a new forkcoin spun out of Bitcoin under his leadership.”
It added: “More specifically, Luke was heavily involved in the creation and implementation of BIP110, the proposal that led to the fork. During that process, he also exercised his authority as a BIP Editor inconsistently with the established editorial process unfairly favoring the proposal he was involved in.”
The post further added that Luke has otherwise made hardly any contributions to the day-to-day work of the BIP Editors and “exercised his editorial privileges in a manner that raises conflict-of-interest concerns.”
Dashjr is one of Bitcoin Core’s earliest contributors but clashed with the network’s main developers — and wider community — after he became one of the biggest supporters of (BIP)-110, a Bitcoin softfork aimed at reducing spam on the Bitcoin network.
The wider Bitcoin industry opposed the proposal and it failed spectacularly when attempting to change Bitcoin consensus rules during the weekend, picking up only a fraction of the mining power of the main Bitcoin network.
Dashjr on Monday wrote on X that he was taking a sabbatical as chairman and CTO from Ocean, a mining company that supported the fork, and would dedicate his efforts to “working on Bitcoin and open-source projects to support Bitcoin.”
The (BIP)-110 proposal failed to get consensus Saturday when the nodes that support the proposal broke away from the main network and produced a new, out of consensus blockchain that people had been warning about.
The new chain stalled after two blocks were mined by enthusiasts and has gone nowhere since Saturday as hashpower from miners has been dedicated to the main Bitcoin network.
The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-110 appeared to stall at the weekend, when the nodes that support the proposal broke away from the main network and produced the chain split people had been warning about — a tiny, stalled one.
The split came Saturday at block 961,632, when the proposal entered its mandatory signaling window. Nodes running BIP-110 software began rejecting any block that failed to signal support through version bit 4. When the first block at that height arrived without the signal, those nodes rejected it and peeled away onto a separate chain.
And it has gone almost nowhere since.
A pseudonymous mining group called Roughnecks produced both BIP-110 blocks — heights 961,632 and 961,633 — using Ocean’s DATUM protocol, then stopped. By Sunday afternoon the enforcing branch remained stuck at 961,633 while Bitcoin’s dominant chain had advanced to 961,744, a gap of 111 blocks and roughly 17 hours without a new block on the fork.
The support was never there. Only 51 of the 2,016 blocks in the preceding difficulty period signaled for the proposal, about 2.53%, against the 55% threshold needed for voluntary lock-in. Since the mandatory window opened, none of the first 113 blocks on the dominant chain have signaled.
Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment compounds the problem. The fork inherited the main chain’s difficulty but commands a negligible share of hashpower, and cannot make mining easier until it completes a full 2,016-block period. Estimates of how long that would take range from under a year to decades, depending on the hashrate assumed.
BIP-110, formally the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, would have capped arbitrary data in transactions for roughly a year, targeting Ordinals inscriptions and oversized OP_RETURN payloads.
Michael Saylor and Blockstream’s Adam Back both opposed it publicly, objecting less to the goal than to an activation method they argued invited exactly this outcome. Saylor wrote Sunday that Bitcoin had worked as designed, putting 99.85% of hashpower on the main chain.
Mining company Ocean, whose team supported the proposal, informed clients that some miners using Ocean’s Stratum templates may have believed they were mining on Bitcoin while their hashrate was directed to the new BIP-110 chain.
The company said it would reimburse miners affected with rewards they would have earned on the non-BIP-110 chain during that window.
Author’s note: In my view BIP110 is both useless and harmful, and I do expect it to fail (see scenario 1). Despite this I tried to write this article as factually as I could, entertaining different possible scenarios, as I do hope it may provide some clarity on this soft fork attempt.
The OP_RETURN debate has escalated to the point where Bitcoin Knots implemented BIP110: a consensus protocol change that temporarily limits the size of OP_RETURNs and intends to reduce other types of data on Bitcoin’s blockchain as well.
However BIP110 does not have consensus: not everyone agrees there’s a problem that requires solving in the first place, nor that BIP110 solves it in any meaningful manner, while it restricts Bitcoin in potentially harmful ways. Most obviously, Bitcoin Core — still by far the most-used Bitcoin implementation — has not adopted BIP110, while only some 1-2% of hash power has been signaling support for it in recent weeks.
Nevertheless, BIP110-nodes like Bitcoin Knots will soon — starting from block 961,632, to be mined on or around August 8 — reject blocks that don’t signal support for the upgrade.
Here are the three main scenarios for how that could play out.
Scenario 1: (almost) no miners signal
If current miner signaling is any indication, this is the scenario to expect.
From the perspective of anyone running Bitcoin Core or other non-BIP110 enforcing nodes and wallets (the vast majority of the Bitcoin ecosystem) blocks will be mined as usual, and transactions will be processed like normal too. Anyone who’s not actively tracking these events on social media or elsewhere may not even be aware that anything unusual is going on, and in a practical sense for them there really won’t be; BIP110 does not affect them.
The same is not true for anyone running Bitcoin Knots or other BIP110-enforcing nodes, however. Since their software will reject non-signaling blocks, they basically wouldn’t see any new blocks at all (or perhaps a few per week), and incoming and outgoing transactions won’t confirm (or incredibly slow). In practical terms, these nodes would stall and become unusable.
If this happens, BIP110 proponents will have to decide between waiting to see if things improve for them (see scenario 3), giving up (switching back to non-BIP110 software), or deploying a next protocol change, like hard forking to a different proof-of-work mining algorithm.
Such a hard fork would possibly allow for mining with GPUs again, therefore letting more people mine new blocks to generate a blockchain with the BIP110 rules enforced. However this would also mean that BIP110/hard fork nodes permanently split off from the rest of the Bitcoin ecosystem to essentially create a new cryptocurrency. (More on this below)
Scenario 2: (almost) all miners signal
This is the scenario several prominent BIP110 proponents predict.
In this scenario, when the mandatory signaling window starts, all miners will suddenly signal for BIP110. Or at least, a majority of miners will signal AND reject any non-signaling blocks, so that all blocks that end up in the blockchain include a BIP110 signal.
If this happens, all Bitcoin nodes (Knots and Core alike) remain compatible, and the signals in the blocks indicate that miners plan to start enforcing the BIP110 rules another two weeks later. BIP110-violating transactions should by early September no longer end up in blocks.
In essence, this is the success scenario for BIP110; although only a small faction of developers, miners and users pushed for it, the upgrade goes into effect across the entire network.
…However even in this scenario there is an important caveat.
Blockchain signaling is a useful coordination mechanism for soft fork deployment, but it technically does not guarantee that the new rules will be enforced. Miners can signal support for the upgrade without actually using BIP110 software, which they for example could elect to do simply to ensure their blocks aren’t rejected by Bitcoin Knots nodes during the mandatory signaling window.
Bitcoin’s protocol rules are ultimately enforced by economic nodes however, and nothing currently indicates that most of these will enforce the BIP110 rules even if all blocks include a signal. So if BIP110-violating transactions are later accepted by most miners regardless, these economic nodes would accept blocks that include them, while BIP110 nodes would not. The blockchain would split between nodes that do and do not enforce BIP110 after all.
Scenario 3: a sizable minority of miners signal
This is the scenario that would immediately split the chain.
Currently some two percent of miners signal support for BIP110, which is probably too little to be meaningful (see scenario 1). But let’s imagine this quickly increases tenfold or so. We also have to imagine that this sizable minority itself rejects any non-signaling blocks— else it would still be indistinguishable from scenario 1 where BIP110 nodes stall (since they require ALL blocks to include a signal).
If the sizable minority is both signaling and rejecting non-signaling blocks, they’d start to build their own minority blockchain with only signaling blocks in it. Blocks on this minority chain would confirm significantly slower than usual — maybe just one or two per hour — but BIP110 nodes remain reasonably usable. And after a few months the mining difficulty would adjust, so blocks are found (closer to) six times per hour again. Another couple of weeks later the BIP110 rules would go into effect.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin Core and other non-BIP110 enforcing nodes would still operate fairly normally as well. Their blocks will confirm a little bit slower for a while — maybe about four or five per hour — but after a couple weeks mining difficulty adjusts here too, to also bring this back to six per hour on average. The BIP110 rules would never go into effect on this blockchain.
As a result, a BIP110 blockchain and a blockchain with the original rules would then exist side by side as two different cryptocurrencies, indefinitely.
There is one notable caveat to this scenario as well, however. If the BIP110 chain were to overtake the original chain in length later on (due to miners moving to the BIP110 chain), all nodes — Core and Knots alike — would accept the BIP110 chain as the only chain. The original chain would in this case be discarded, or wiped out.
This one-sided wipe out risk is in fact why BIP110 proponents expect all miners to signal preemptively, preventing a split. Miners won’t want to mine on a blockchain that can later be discarded, they argue, as that would also mean losing all block rewards they earned on it.
In actuality, users and miners that want to prevent that the original chain can get wiped out could do so however: they can manually invalidate any block on the minority BIP110 chain while it still is the minority chain. This way their nodes would reject switching to it even if it becomes longer at any point in the future, making the split permanent also.
So what exactly happens if the chain permanently splits? If and when the Bitcoin blockchain permanently splits, it essentially marks the creation of a new cryptocurrency, or forkcoin. Everyone who owns BTC at the time of the split automatically receives the equivalent amount of coins on the new blockchain, not unlike what happened with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash in 2017.
However in reality these things aren’t necessarily as straightforward, and if BIP110 does cause a chain split under any of the scenarios above there will likely be some complications.
For one, there’ll almost certainly be disagreement over which side of the chain represents “Bitcoin” (“BTC”), and which side is the new forkcoin. It seems likely however that the blockchain with the original rules will by most people be considered “Bitcoin”, whereas the blockchain with the BIP110 rules will be called something else; we’ll call it “BIP110 coin” for now.
Accessing the BIP110 coins then, will require BIP110-specific software like, indeed, Bitcoin Knots. The new coins won’t show up on Bitcoin Core nodes or most wallets.
However, BIP110 does not currently include replay protection. This means that transactions on one chain can be copied (“replayed”) on the other chain. Instead of just sending BTC, users could unknowingly also send the equivalent BIP110 coin to an identical address on the BIP110 chain— or vice versa.
It’s difficult to estimate at this point how much the forkcoins will be worth, or even if they will be worth anything at all. The lack of interest in buying BIP110 coins via fork future contracts does suggest there may not be much interest to buy them after a split either. But if you nevertheless want to be sure you’ll receive BIP110 coins if there are any, it’s probably best to self-custody your BTC (have access to your private keys), and don’t send any transactions until the dust settles and there is more clarity on how to proceed.
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