Bitcoin miners reject Luke Dashjr's BIP110 protocol fork
- Over 99 percent of Bitcoin miners rejected Luke Dashjr's BIP110 protocol fork.
- Core maintainers removed Dashjr as proposal editor after he bypassed code review rules.
- Mining pools proved that node operators cannot unilaterally rewrite network consensus.
Bitcoin's latest governance revolt died in under a week.
Developer Luke Dashjr tried to force BIP110 on the network to filter out Ordinals and non-monetary inscriptions. The software needed pool support to function. Instead, 99 percent of miners rejected the code and kept hashing on the main chain. The rogue network stalled after producing just two blocks. Node activism failed to overrule mining economics.
The backlash against Dashjr's attempt was immediate. On the Bitcoin And show, host David Bennett reported that Ocean Mining redirected user hash power to the stalled chain without customer consent. Ocean later offered 0.3 Bitcoin in rebates to appease furious clients. Dashjr subsequently took a sabbatical from his leadership role at the pool.
In August 2026, core developer Mark Erhardt filed a pull request to remove Dashjr from his role as a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal maintainer. Erhardt cited editorial misconduct and noted Dashjr skipped review protocols to fast-track his proposal. Bennett observed that Dashjr had authored fewer than 1 percent of maintainer comments over the preceding four months.
Investor Simon Dixon framed the collapse on BTC Sessions as a crucial test of node authority. Dixon backed the campaign to see if organized node operators could coerce large mining pools like Foundry into accepting policy changes. The experiment failed completely. Dixon noted that the result established firm boundaries. Users can reject invalid transactions, but they cannot force miners to produce blocks under controversial rules.
The split chain failed to regain momentum even after initial defeat. On Stacker News Live, hosts Keon and Car noted that the remaining faction produced only four blocks over a full week under a single pool. Desperate maintainers proposed switching the chain to GPU mining under a new algorithm. Keon described the collapse as a clean break for the main protocol.
The failed fork coincided with a broader defense test across the ecosystem. Infrastructure providers suffered simultaneous software exploits, which drove some retail holders toward institutional products. BlackRock promptly lowered its ETF conversion threshold to capture panic capital. Bennett argued that Bitcoin's base consensus held firm without central intervention. Protocol rules outlived individual developers.
Consensus won. Ego lost.