$NVDAB historical record of a decade and a door that closes

Dashjr was editor of BIP practically from 2011, and for more than a decade he was the sole person responsible for assigning numbers and merging proposals—a de facto monopoly that triggered recurring frustration.

But in April 2024, after months of debate, five editors were added (Bryan Bishop, Murch, Ruben Somsen, Olaoluwa Osuntokun and Jonatack), an explicit reform designed to end his exclusive control. That also responds to a reality that Dashjr and his entourage seem unable to accept: Dashjr has been without performing tasks within the BIP ecosystem for more than 28 months, and his only recent actions were to favor BIP-110.

On the way, episodes remained such as the 2021 blocking of the Taproot activation parameters (Dashjr was openly against it), the attempt to get his Bitcoin Knots fork through the Bitcoin Core package for Gentoo in 2014, and the dispute over the use of Core’s translation resources for Knots in 2024.

There is a structural irony in the motion: Dashjr wrote BIP-2, the process document that governed BIP editing for nine years, while Murch wrote its replacement, BIP-3, which “explicitly tightened the margins of judgment assigned to the editor role.” For Dashjr’s defenders, the sequence is a purge: they rewrote the process to limit his discretion, and then removed him for exercising it.

To his critics, it marks the closing of a cycle in which Dashjr himself put himself outside the rules: first by pushing a contentious soft fork and then leading the move toward a hard fork that most of the ecosystem considers hostile. Murch summed it up by quoting Dashjr’s own words: “Now that they’ve made you king of your own forkcoin… ‘Bpedo isn’t Bitcoin’.”

Implications and outlook

Now that the BIP-110 proposal is closed, the scenario is reduced to two paths. If the PoW plan is executed on September 1, an independent chain will be born with a new algorithm, with no listings on exchanges, no compatible ASICs, and no economic alignment that BIP-110 was never able to achieve via the soft fork route; its backers would have to “hire” a mining industry from scratch, a coordination problem among multiple stakeholders exactly like the one that already failed in the soft branch. If it is not executed, the threat remains what many in the ecosystem believe it was: a minority’s bluff that tried to impose rules by node decree and lost.

In any case, the episode has already permanently changed Bitcoin’s governance. The first removal of a BIP Editor in history leaves the community without a procedural precedent, forces a discussion about whether the role should be a mere notary or a gatekeeper with judgment, and shows that even without a formal removal mechanism, reputation and approximate consensus remain the ultimate law of Bitcoin development. What BIP-110 failed to achieve in consensus, the expulsion of its main driving force did achieve in practice: closing the decade-long circle of conflicts surrounding Luke Dashjr.