The motion to remove Luke Dashjr is a purge dressed up as process

A purge in search of a process

On 9 August 2026, Mark "Murch" Erhardt posted a motion to the Bitcoin development mailing list to strip Luke Dashjr of his role as a BIP editor. Within ninety minutes three allies had lined up behind it: Jameson Lopp, Matt Corallo, and Olaoluwa Osuntokun. The thread reads like a vote already counted. But strip away the speed and the pile-on, and what remains is a move to remove one of the longest-serving editors of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process through a procedure that, by the movers' own admission, does not exist.

The admission that undoes the motion

The most important sentence in the entire thread was not written by Dashjr. It was written by one of the people trying to remove him. "This is unprecedented because there is, to my knowledge, no formal governance structure or policy around management of BIP Editors," Jameson Lopp wrote, before adding, "This isn't a democracy and I have no vote."

Read those two sentences together. There is no rule for removing a BIP editor: no defined cause, no defined procedure, no defined electorate. So a handful of editors have decided to invent one on the spot, apply it for the first time to a colleague they have publicly feuded with for years, and treat the outcome as settled before he has meaningfully been heard. That is not governance. It is a faction using its numbers to remove a dissenter and calling the result process.

The charges are thinner than the confidence behind them

Murch's specific accusations, taken one at a time, do not carry the weight the conclusion demands.

He says Dashjr exercised his authority "inconsistently with the established editorial process." The concrete examples are that Dashjr floated a BIP number on Twitter before list discussion and merged an update pull request quickly. These are editorial housekeeping acts, the ordinary friction of a registry that has always run on the judgment of individual editors. Assigning numbers and merging formatting changes is what editors do. The act only becomes an offense if you have already decided that the proposal underneath, BIP110, is illegitimate, and that is a judgment about content, which is precisely what an editor is not supposed to be policing.

He says Dashjr has done little of the day-to-day work since April 2024, "fewer than 1% of the BIP Editor comments." But being a light-touch editor is not misconduct, and it sits oddly next to the opposite complaint that he did too much on this one occasion. Low activity is a reason to thank a volunteer for a decade of service, not grounds to strip him of standing. The April 2024 date matters, too: the editors now moving against Dashjr are largely the ones who arrived in 2024. This is newcomers voting out the veteran whose seat predates theirs.

He says communication has "broken down." Dashjr's answer is direct: "You are the one who stopped communicating, not I." A breakdown between two people is not, on its face, evidence about which of them is at fault, and it is certainly not a neutral finding when the person declaring the breakdown is the same person seeking the removal.

Reputation is not a charge

Lopp was candid about what this really rests on. "It seems to me that ultimately this comes down to reputation," he wrote, before offering several paragraphs of character assessment: that Dashjr is "poorly suited to working well with others," that he "operates under completely different definitions of terms," that he shows "open hostility." Osuntokun's second was written in open mockery, sneering at "bcash jr" and addressing an imagined Dashjr as "you fool."

Set aside whether any of that is fair. None of it is a rule that was broken. A standards process that removes an editor because colleagues find him abrasive, contrarian, or personally disagreeable has quietly redefined the job from neutral gatekeeper to team player in good standing with the majority. Dashjr's entire record, for better or worse, is that of a man who says no when others say yes. Punishing exactly that trait through an editorial office is the opposite of what an independent editor is for.

The conflict of interest runs both ways

The strongest-sounding charge is conflict of interest: Dashjr championed BIP110, that work spun into a fork, and Osuntokun argues he "now is the head of a project" at odds with Bitcoin. It is a real tension, and Dashjr should be scrupulous about it. But the people sitting in judgment are not neutral either. Murch, Corallo, and Osuntokun are established figures in the Bitcoin Core mainstream that Dashjr has spent years dissenting from. If an editor's outside allegiances disqualify him, the same test applied honestly would implicate much of the room.

That is the real danger in what is being attempted. If a majority of editors can remove a colleague by ad-hoc motion whenever he backs a proposal they consider heretical, the BIP repository stops being a neutral registry of ideas and becomes an instrument of whichever faction holds the keys. Dissenting proposals would learn that the road to a BIP number runs through the majority's approval of their politics, not through process. That is a far larger threat to Bitcoin's standards than one editor merging a pull request too fast.

What removal would actually establish

Dashjr's reply ran four sentences, and on the substance it was not wrong: "I have followed the BIP process consistently for years. Your novice opinions alone do not establish new processes." Whatever one thinks of his manner, that last point is the crux. There is no established process here, and you do not cure the absence of one by improvising a removal against the person you like least. If the BIP editors genuinely need a way to remove their own, they should write it down, publish it, debate it, and adopt it in the open, the way any Bitcoin change is supposed to happen, and then apply it going forward. Reaching for the exit first and the rulebook never is how you lose the thing that made the office worth holding.