Miners crush Luke Dashjr rogue Bitcoin fork attempt
- Bitcoin miners rejected BIP 110, stranding Luke Dashjr's anti-spam fork after just two blocks.
- Core maintainers removed Dashjr as proposal editor after he bypassed review rules to push code.
- The collapse proved that node rebellion cannot force changes on miners without full network consensus.
Bitcoin's consensus mechanism just delivered a brutal lesson in protocol inertia.
When Luke Dashjr attempted to deploy BIP 110 to strip Ordinals and text inscriptions from the blockchain, the network answered with overwhelming rejection. Over 99 percent of total hash power stayed on the main chain, leaving Dashjr’s fork stranded after producing just two blocks. Ocean Mining briefly redirected user hash power to the split chain without consent, later issuing a 0.3 Bitcoin rebate to appease furious miners.
The fallout moved fast from the blockchain to repository governance. The next day, 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 Dashjr had authored less than one percent of editorial comments over four months while bypassing standard review processes to fast-track BIP 110.
"Ego collided with consensus, and consensus won."
- David Bennett, Bitcoin And
Dashjr announced a sabbatical from his role as Ocean pool chairman as miners abandoned the facility. His Bitcoin Knots client was left compromised by a pivot toward a separate proof-of-work chain. The defeat exposed hard limits on developer authority when confronted by market incentives.
As the post-mortem unfolded across the industry two days later, investor Simon Dixon framed the failed rebellion on BTC Sessions as the 2017 block size war in reverse. Back then, user nodes successfully blocked a corporate attempt to alter code. This time, even as adoption of Dashjr’s Bitcoin Knots client surged to nearly twenty percent, node operators could not force mining giants into compliance.
On Bankless, commentator Ryan Sean Adams observed that without massive hash power, prospective forks cannot survive their initial difficulty adjustment. Code can be copied in seconds, but security and economic liquidity remain tied to the main chain.
"Code can be copied instantly, but network effects and security cannot be cloned."
- Ryan Sean Adams, Bankless
Consensus requires total ecosystem buy-in across miners, developers, and users. Without it, even the most prominent core developers find themselves locked out of the protocol.