Mark Erhardt ousts Luke Dashjr after failed Bitcoin fork
- Mark Erhardt removed Luke Dashjr as BIP editor after a contentious anti-spam soft fork failed.
- BIP 110 stalled after producing only two blocks, as 99.85% of miners stayed on mainnet.
- Node operators failed to force policy changes on miners, leaving Bitcoin Core firmly in control.
The rebellion collapsed in just two blocks.
BIP 110 was pitched as a crusade to strip Ordinals and text inscriptions from Bitcoin. Proponents rallied around core developer Luke Dashjr, attempting to use node client adoption to dictate protocol policy. On BTC Sessions, investor Simon Dixon noted that adoption of Dashjr’s Bitcoin Knots client jumped from under 1 percent to nearly 20 percent. The goal was simple: test whether an organized minority of node operators could pressure mining pools into accepting a policy rollback.
Miners refused to yield. On Bitcoin And, host David Bennett explained that 99.85 percent of overall hash power remained firmly on the primary chain. Only Ocean Mining - a pool where Dashjr served as chairman - redirected user hash power toward the fork without explicit consent. The rogue chain stalled after mining just two blocks, frozen by high difficulty parameters that its meager hash rate could not overcome.
The fallout was swift. Ocean was forced to offer a 0.3 Bitcoin rebate to angry miners whose hash power had been hijacked. On Bitcoin And, Bennett pointed out that market discipline resolved the dispute almost instantly, showing that economic incentives easily trumped ideological mandates. Rather than bending the network to their will, the node revolt left its backers isolated and key sovereign users burned.
Then came the political accounting. Bitcoin Core maintainer Mark Erhardt filed a pull request to strip Dashjr of his role as a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal editor. Erhardt cited editorial misconduct, noting that Dashjr bypassed standard governance procedures to fast-track BIP 110. Prior to forcing the soft fork, Dashjr had authored fewer than 1 percent of editorial comments over the preceding four months. Facing public backlash, Dashjr announced a sabbatical from Ocean Mining while attacking main-chain developers online.
The failed fork reveals a hard lesson about Bitcoin governance. On BTC Sessions, Dixon observed that while the 2017 block size war saw user nodes successfully block corporate changes, this attempt to force a retrofitted policy rollback on miners proved that nodes cannot unilaterally dictate rules. Without total alignment across miners, developers, and users, protocol changes stall.
In the end, consensus won and the status quo held. Bitcoin Core remains the undisputed client implementation, while miners continue prioritizing fee revenue over social engineering. The system worked exactly as designed.