Luke Dashjr.

Bitcoin Core and the BIPs

Luke Dashjr has worked on Bitcoin’s software since 2011; Bitcoin Magazine calls him “one of Bitcoin Core’s earliest contributors”. Bitcoin Core is the software run by most of Bitcoin’s nodes, the computers that check and pass on its payments. He has also written or co-written 13 Bitcoin Improvement ProposalsBIPA public document describing a proposed change to Bitcoin, or a standard that wallets can follow. (BIPs), the public documents in which developers propose changes and standards for Bitcoin. Three of them, starting with BIP-22, describe getblocktemplate: a way for a node to hand mining software the whole of a new block, so that the miner can choose what goes into it.⁠^{[13][11][5][1]}

On 7 January 2016 Dashjr announced that Gregory Maxwell had asked him to take over as the BIP editor responsible for assigning numbers to new proposals. An editor checks that a proposal meets the repository’s rules, gives it a number and publishes it. Publication does not mean that a proposal “is a good idea, has community consensus, or that it is about to be adopted”, the repository says. Dashjr also wrote BIP-2, a revised set of rules for the process, and he remained an editor for more than ten years.⁠^[2][1][10]

In 2021, as developers argued over how to switch on TaprootTaprootA 2021 upgrade that added Schnorr signatures and addresses starting bc1p, making complex payments cheaper and more private., an upgrade to Bitcoin’s rules, Dashjr was the “most notable and most experienced contributor” to a rival version of Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Magazine reported. Bitcoin Core gave miners three months to signal that they were ready, and would let the attempt lapse if they didn’t. The rival version gave them until late 2022 and would then have rejected blocks that didn’t signal, using BIP-8, a method Dashjr had written with Shaolin Fry. Miners signalled in time, and Taproot switched on in November 2021.⁠^[14][1][15]

Like other Bitcoin developers, Dashjr was named a defendant in two lawsuits in England by Craig Wright, who said he was Satoshi Nakamoto. In one, Wright’s company Tulip Trading wanted the developers to change Bitcoin’s code to recover coins it said hackers had taken. Wright abandoned both in 2024 after the High Court ruled he was not Satoshi, and the judge certified them “totally without merit”.⁠^[22]

Bitcoin Knots and OCEAN

Dashjr is the main maintainer of Bitcoin Knots, an alternative version of Bitcoin’s node software. Knots is built from Bitcoin Core but adds changes of its own, among them filters that stop a node passing on transactions he regards as spam. In December 2023 his own website counted 147 Knots nodes, 0.22% of the total, against 66,545 running Bitcoin Core, The Block reported.⁠^[5]

Knots users check that a download is genuine, and free of malware, with Dashjr’s PGP key, a digital key for signing files. On 1 January 2023 he wrote on Twitter: “PSA: My PGP key is compromised, and at least many of my bitcoins stolen. I have no idea how. Help please.” An hour later he appealed to the FBI (“why can’t I reach anyone???”), and an hour after that he added: “Nevermind many. It’s basically all gone”. He also warned: “DO NOT DOWNLOAD BITCOIN KNOTS AND TRUST IT UNTIL THIS IS RESOLVED.”⁠^{[3][17][18][4]}

Dashjr has also run mining poolsMining poolA group of miners who share the work of finding blocks and split the rewards, so each gets paid steadily instead of rarely., services through which many miners share the work of finding blocks and split the rewards. He founded Eligius, a pool that charged no fees and ran until 2017, The Block reported. Its successor, Mummolin, a company he co-founded, raised $6.2 million in November 2023 to launch a new pool, OCEAN, in a funding round led by Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of the company Block. “The role of mining pools must change for Bitcoin to exist as a truly decentralized currency,” Dashjr said. He served as OCEAN’s chairman and chief technology officer.⁠^[16][5][11]

Is it spam?

In 2023 a new use of Bitcoin set off a long argument: inscriptionsInscription (ordinals)Data, such as an image, written into a Taproot payment's witness and tied to one satoshi, so it lives on the blockchain., a way of writing images, text and other files into Bitcoin transactions, often sold as digital collectibles under the name Ordinals. In December 2023 Dashjr wrote that inscriptions “are exploiting a vulnerability in Bitcoin Core to spam the blockchainBlockchainBitcoin's shared record of every payment since 2009, stored in blocks that each link to the one before — which is what makes it a chain.”. Since 2013, he explained, Bitcoin Core had let users limit how much extra data they would relay or mine, and inscriptions got round that limit by disguising their data as program code. “This bug was recently fixed in Bitcoin Knots v25.1,” he added. OCEAN said it was using that version of Knots to filter inscriptions out of its blocks.⁠^[5]

Many disagreed, The Block reported. Jameson Lopp, then chief technology officer of the bitcoin custody company Casa, said: “Classifying them as spam is subjective: it depends on if you believe that you should get to decide what use cases are an appropriate use of the Bitcoin protocol or if you believe that any valid transaction that pays a competitive fee should be allowed to purchase block space.” Udi Wertheimer, a co-founder of the Ordinals project Taproot Wizards, said Dashjr “does not own the chain”.⁠^[5][19]

In April 2025 the argument reached Bitcoin Core’s own settings. On the Bitcoin developers’ mailing list, Antoine Poinsot, a Bitcoin Core developer, proposed scrapping a Core default that capped OP_RETURNOP_RETURNA payment output that stores data instead of paying someone. It can never be spent, so nodes don't track it as spendable. outputs, the part of a transaction made for carrying a little data, at 83 bytes. The limit was meant “to mildly deter data storage”, he wrote, but it had proved “ineffective”, and developers were storing data in more harmful ways to get round it.⁠^[6]

Nine days later Dashjr answered on the same list, calling Poinsot’s proposal “utter insanity”. “The bugs should be fixed, not the abuse embraced,” he wrote. “Am I the only one left on this list who actually cares about Bitcoin’s survival?” Sjors Provoost, another Bitcoin Core contributor, replied that filters like Dashjr’s worked against financial incentives, and that only a change to Bitcoin’s rules could succeed: “Only consensus changes can work, but so far you haven’t proposed those.” Dashjr called that “nonsense”. A filter didn’t have to stop everything to be worth having, he wrote: “It’s sufficient to make spam unwelcome and costly. No spam filtration solution needs to be perfect. Every little bit helps.”⁠^[6][20]

Six weeks later 31 Bitcoin Core contributors, including Poinsot and Pieter Wuille, set out their view in a statement. Node software should not block “transactions that have sustained economic demand and reliably make it into blocks”, they wrote. Refusing to relay them forces users to find other ways of reaching miners, which undermines decentralised mining, and “circumventing filters of the vast majority of the nodes is relatively easy”. “This is not endorsing or condoning non-financial data usage,” they added, “but accepting that as a censorship-resistant system, Bitcoin can and will be used for use cases not everyone agrees on.”⁠^[7]

Bitcoin Core 30.0, released on 10 October 2025, raised the default limit to 100,000 bytes, which “effectively uncaps the limit”, its release notes say; anyone who wants the old limit can still set it. The Bitcoin developer Peter Todd had opened a pull request, a proposed change to the code, on 27 April 2025 to remove the limit outright. It was closed in favour of a similar change that kept the setting, and that is what shipped.⁠^[20][21]

BIP-110 and the split

Filters only decide what a node passes on. BIP-110 set out to change what Bitcoin accepts. The proposal is credited to Dathon Ohm, with “original draft and advice” from Luke-Jr, the name Dashjr uses online. It was a soft forkSoft forkA change that tightens Bitcoin's rules, so nodes that haven't upgraded still accept the new blocks., a tightening of the rules, meant to last one year. Blocks would be invalid if they contained transactions carrying a piece of data larger than 256 bytes, too small even for a heavily compressed image, and OP_RETURN data would be capped at 83 bytes again. If miners signalled support in 55% of blocks, the rules would take effect. If they didn’t, nodes enforcing BIP-110 would reject every block that failed to signal, starting at block 961,632, much as the rival Taproot client of 2021 would have done.⁠^[8][12][14]

Miners did not follow. When block 961,632 was mined, on Saturday 8 August 2026, the nodes enforcing BIP-110 broke away onto a chain of their own. It attracted only a fraction of the network’s mining power and had stalled after two blocks when Bitcoin Magazine reported on 11 August. The BIP-110 document has since been marked Closed, “following a chain split with stalled mining”.⁠^[8][11]

The next day Mark Erhardt, a fellow BIP editor known as Murch, proposed on the same mailing list that Dashjr be removed. Dashjr had been “heavily involved in the creation and implementation of BIP110”, he wrote, and had used his position as an editor in a way “unfairly favoring the proposal he was involved in”. He added that Dashjr had done little of the editors’ everyday work, and that trust between him and the other editors had broken down. About an hour later Dashjr replied: “These are false accusations. I have followed the BIP process consistently for years.” He added: “You are the one who should be removed.” On 10 August his fellow editors removed his access to the BIPs repository and took his name off their list.⁠^[9][10]

Dashjr called the decision “an abuse of power by Core”, adding: “They have no authority to do so.” The same day he said he was taking a sabbatical as chairman and chief technology officer of OCEAN, the mining pool he co-founded, which had backed the fork, and would focus on “working on Bitcoin and open-source projects to support Bitcoin”. On 29 August he and OCEAN announced that he had left the company, which bought back his shares, citing “different visions for the future of Bitcoin mining”; he would start a new mining venture, CONVOY.⁠^[11][23]

Knots carried on with the BIP-110 chain. On 2 September 2026 Dashjr published Bitcoin Knots 29.4.1, a hard forkHard forkA change that loosens Bitcoin's rules, so nodes running old software reject the new blocks. Without near-universal agreement it splits the chain.: a change to the rules that older software rejects. It replaced Bitcoin’s proof of workProof of workA puzzle that takes a computer real effort to solve, so the answer proves the effort was spent. Bitcoin’s miners use it to add each block., the puzzle miners solve to add a block, with a different one called BLAKE2b, kept BIP-110’s limits, and capped blocks at about 300 kB for the time being. From that version on, Knots follows a different chain from Bitcoin Core. The release notes say that on 8 August “most former miners abandoned Bitcoin en masse”, and call the chain they kept mining “a new altcoin”. Murch’s motion had put it the other way round, calling the BIP-110 chain “a new forkcoin spun out of Bitcoin”.⁠^[12][9]