Mark “Murch” Erhardt, a Bitcoin Core developer and fellow BIP Editor, has formally recommended removing Luke Dashjr from the group of editors who oversee Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. The move comes in the wake of BIP-110’s failure, a proposal that attempted to regulate arbitrary data embedding in Bitcoin transactions and reportedly triggered a chainsplit.
What went wrong with BIP-110
BIP-110 was a consensus soft fork proposal designed to impose temporary limits on data storage features within Bitcoin transactions. The stated goal was to preserve Bitcoin’s core function as sound money by clamping down on what proponents viewed as misuse of block space for arbitrary data storage.
On August 9, the proposal’s mandatory signaling began at block 961,632 with a required miner support threshold of 55%. That threshold, notably low by historical soft fork standards, didn’t save it. The proposal failed and reportedly caused a chainsplit, precisely the kind of network disruption that Bitcoin’s governance process is supposed to prevent.
Erhardt’s complaint centers on how Dashjr handled the proposal from an editorial standpoint. According to Erhardt, Dashjr prematurely assigned a BIP number to the proposal and then hastily merged a related pull request, bypassing the coordination and review that typically accompanies changes of this magnitude.
