One of Bitcoin’s earliest core contributors has lost a long-held role in how the network proposes changes. Other Bitcoin developers voted to remove Luke Dashjr as an editor of Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), the formal documents used to suggest and coordinate protocol changes, after a softfork he championed split from the main network, according to the motion posted on the BIP GitHub page Bitcoin Magazine. Bitcoin Magazine, which also distributes a dedicated news app through Apple’s App Store Apple App Store, first reported the editors’ decision.
The editors said the removal followed “many contentious disputes” within the ecosystem and pointed to Dashjr’s central role in BIP-110, a softfork intended to reduce spam on the Bitcoin network Bitcoin Magazine. They wrote that he “exercised his authority as a BIP Editor inconsistently with the established editorial process unfairly favoring the proposal he was involved in,” and that his day-to-day editorial contributions had been minimal.
Dashjr rejected the vote. “This is just an abuse of power by Core. They have no authority to do so,” he wrote, as quoted by Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin Magazine. The BIP GitHub page operates separately from Bitcoin Core’s main repository, so the editors’ action governs the proposal process rather than the protocol code itself.
The trigger was a failed consensus change. BIP-110 attempted to alter Bitcoin’s consensus rules over the weekend but drew only a fraction of the network’s mining power, and the nodes supporting it broke away to form a new, out-of-consensus blockchain, according to the report Bitcoin Magazine. That forked chain stalled after just two blocks were mined and has produced nothing since, as hashpower returned to the main network.
The shake-up lands as Bitcoin’s governance process draws renewed scrutiny. Dashjr said on Monday he would step back from his roles at Ocean, a mining company that backed the fork, to focus on “working on Bitcoin and open-source projects to support Bitcoin,” per Bitcoin Magazine’s coverage Bitcoin Magazine.
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