A dispute over editorial authority in Bitcoin’s improvement proposal process escalated sharply when BIP editor Mark “Murch” Erhardt publicly called for the removal of Luke Dashjr, a veteran developer and fellow editor, from the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) editorial team. The flashpoint is BIP-110, a controversial soft fork proposal whose handling has exposed deep fractures over how the BIP repository should be governed.
Erhardt submitted his recommendation to the Bitcoin development mailing list on August 9, arguing that Dashjr had inconsistently exercised editorial privileges and allowed BIP-110 to receive a premature proposal number and unusually rapid merging of subsequent changes. His criticism centered on whether Dashjr’s active involvement in a contentious consensus proposal was compatible with maintaining a neutral editorial process. Erhardt said the role of a BIP editor is procedural—not to determine what becomes a network rule, but to manage how proposals are formatted, published and maintained in the repository—and that Dashjr’s actions had eroded trust, communication and coordination among editors.
Dashjr rejected the accusations. In a public response, he asserted he had consistently followed the rules defined in BIP 2, the process document governing proposals, and countered that Erhardt himself had broken communication with other editors. He labeled the allegations false and argued it was Erhardt who should be removed.
The editorial clash came immediately after BIP-110 suffered a dramatic collapse in its bid for network adoption. The proposal, which sought temporary consensus restrictions on methods used to embed arbitrary data in Bitcoin transactions, required a 55% miner signaling threshold for early activation and later introduced mandatory signaling. When the mandatory phase began at block 961,632, support hovered between 2% and 3%. Nodes enforcing the BIP-110 rules separated onto a minority chain that produced only two blocks before stalling, while the main Bitcoin chain continued normally. CoinDesk reported BIP-110 entering mandatory signaling with less than 3% miner support, highlighting the gap between a proposal’s repository status and actual network adoption.
The failure has intensified the governance argument. Erhardt’s recommendation does not automatically remove Dashjr; there is no central authority in Bitcoin that can settle such a dispute. Any change would need agreement among repository maintainers and the broader developer community. The episode raises a fundamental question about where the boundary lies between technical advocacy and neutral stewardship of the proposal process, a concern given that editors shape how proposals are presented and archived, influencing the perception of fairness. In the wake of the minority chain’s halt, some BIP-110 supporters, including Dashjr, have discussed adopting a different proof-of-work algorithm for the stalled chain, though no such change has been approved or activated.
