Luke Dashjr made a big bet on how Bitcoin should work, but Bitcoin miners largely declined to follow him. Now, just weeks after the controversial BIP-110 effort failed to gain meaningful support, Dashjr is completely out at OCEAN, the Bitcoin mining pool he co-founded.
OCEAN parent Mummolin and Dashjr announced the separation by mutual agreement. Dashjr resigned as chairman, chief technology officer, and director, while the company repurchased all of his equity. This isn’t another sabbatical or a reduced role. His formal relationship with OCEAN is over.
The joint statement doesn’t explicitly blame BIP 110, but its explanation certainly invites questions. OCEAN and Dashjr say the separation reflects their “different visions for the future of Bitcoin mining following the recent protocol developments.”
Dashjr, one of Bitcoin’s longest-serving developers, championed BIP-110, a controversial proposal designed to temporarily restrict certain methods of putting non-financial data onto the Bitcoin blockchain. It became part of a larger fight over what Bitcoin should be and how much freedom people should have to use its blockchain for purposes beyond financial transactions.
What is Bitcoin BIP-110?
BIP stands for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, which is essentially a formal way of proposing changes or additions to Bitcoin. BIP-110 attempted to address what its supporters consider blockchain spam by limiting the amount and types of arbitrary data that could be included in Bitcoin transactions.
That matters because Bitcoin’s blockchain is no longer used exclusively for moving bitcoin from one person to another. Technologies such as Ordinals have made it possible to embed images and other data into transactions, while other techniques can use Bitcoin’s transaction fields to store information unrelated to ordinary payments.
To Dashjr and other BIP-110 supporters, that behavior consumes limited blockchain space and abuses Bitcoin for purposes it was never intended to serve. From that perspective, restricting arbitrary data isn’t censorship. It is an attempt to keep Bitcoin focused on being a decentralized monetary network.
Opponents see a fundamental problem with that argument. If someone pays the required transaction fee and follows Bitcoin’s consensus rules, they argue that developers shouldn’t get to decide whether that transaction is worthy of being included. Trying to stop unwanted data can therefore look a lot like imposing one group’s preferred use of Bitcoin on everyone else.
BIP-110 tried to turn that philosophy into rules that participating Bitcoin nodes would enforce. That made the disagreement much bigger than an argument about whether Ordinals are annoying. Nodes enforcing BIP 110 could reject blocks containing transactions that other Bitcoin nodes considered valid, creating the possibility of competing chains if enough of the network didn’t adopt the same rules.
And that’s essentially where BIP-110 ran into trouble. You see, the proposal needed substantial miner support to demonstrate that the network was willing to follow the new rules. That support never arrived. Instead of the broader Bitcoin mining ecosystem rallying behind Dashjr’s proposal, only a small portion signaled support.
Once BIP-110’s rules began being enforced by participating nodes, the lack of consensus became impossible to ignore. Rather than Bitcoin broadly moving to the new rules, supporters were effectively left on a minority chain while the overwhelming majority of Bitcoin hashpower continued following the existing network.
That failure gets to the heart of Bitcoin’s decentralized structure. Dashjr may be one of Bitcoin’s longest-serving developers, but neither he nor any other developer can simply order miners, node operators, exchanges, or users to accept a change. They have to voluntarily follow it.
The situation was particularly interesting at OCEAN. The mining pool has promoted decentralization and giving individual miners greater control, yet much of its measured hashpower did not follow the direction its own co-founder was advocating.
There is some irony in that. A system designed to give miners greater independence also gives them the ability to reject the ideas of the person who helped build it. Decentralization doesn’t guarantee that people will make the decision you want them to make.
Dashjr was also recently removed as an editor of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals repository following controversy surrounding BIP-110 and his role in the process. He subsequently announced a sabbatical from his chairman and CTO positions at OCEAN to concentrate on Bitcoin and open-source development.
That sabbatical has now become a permanent separation, and Dashjr isn’t leaving Bitcoin mining behind. He is launching a new venture called CONVOY, which the joint statement says will continue his mission to decentralize Bitcoin mining. OCEAN will continue operating its transparent, non-custodial mining pool.
Did BIP-110 cost Luke Dashjr his job at OCEAN? We don’t know. The separation is described as mutual, and there is no public evidence that OCEAN simply fired Dashjr because of his position on BIP-110.
Still, the timing is difficult to ignore. Dashjr backed a controversial vision for Bitcoin, miners declined to follow it, he lost his BIP editor role, and now he has resigned from OCEAN and given up his ownership stake.
That’s the thing about decentralization, folks. Luke Dashjr was free to bet on his vision for Bitcoin, but everyone else was just as free to say no.
Support independent tech journalism
NERDS.xyz is independently owned and operated. If you enjoy my coverage of Linux, AI, hardware, cybersecurity, and tech culture, consider supporting the site on Ko-fi.
Support NERDS.xyz