From: Antoine Riard <antoine.riard@gmail.com>
To: Bitcoin Development Mailing List <bitcoindev@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] Motion to remove Luke Dashjr from BIP Editors
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 2026 18:40:28 -0700 (PDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <43fa13f1-00bc-47e0-8a46-0668fd435e97n@googlegroups.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <3341dee7-216d-40e6-b1b5-dfd32b3ccb1dn@googlegroups.com>
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Hello
I think it's the best move for Luke to remove himself from the BIP
editorship, even if it's temporary. If he's not blocked from the
github, nothing prevent him to contribute to the review work of
the BIPs in a good spirit in the future and regain his BIP editor
role.
I have very been little been involved in all this OP_RETURN mess,
whatever side one has taken in this discussion, so I hope and aim
to hold an objective tone, in what I'm saying there after.
I do have a very mixed opinion of the Luke's persona himself. On
one hand, I respect the years of hard work and dedication invested
in the bitcoin project. He has been technically contributing more
longer than I had. On the other hand, for someone who is spending
his time questioning the morality of his technical peers, I always
been a bit cold about his professional ethics, given how he did
behave repeatedly few times, especially with what did happen with
coredev atlanta '22.
As a former coreDev co-organizer, I very coldly appreciated that he
went to the FBI to accuse coredev meeting participants to have been
involved in any manner with the loss of his coins at the end of '22
and put the organizers in a situation where they legally had to
reveal the names of *all* the participants in the meeting in an
*indiscriminate* fashion.
Rat'ing out your bitcoin core devs colleagues to a domestic intel
agency to have a case build on all of them is very not okay, and I
would say this whatever the jurisdiction that would be involved.
Beyond, once the FBI subpoena was public, I reached out privately
to Luke in April '24 to have more clarifications on this affair,
as a former coredev co-organizer.
Neither Luke, neither the FBI went back to me and as far as I know
no participant was ever worried or more questioned about this Luke
claim, so it tells you a lot about the seriousness of the ungrounded
accusations that were made on the coredev participants as an indiscriminate
group. If you have ever a problem with someone in this space, keep it
contained and stay professional. There is a sense of measure and
balance to have.
On the removal of Luke, if it has been to be done by using the
github administrative permission, as far as I know there is no
mention in BIP1 or BIP2 or BIP3 about what is a formal process
to remove someone from a BIP editor role, against her or his consent.
Short of that, in my opinion if there is a wish to make the removal
happening on bright lines, I would suggest to follow the following
formalities:
- in the lack of a clear organ deciding the removal of the BIP editor,
have all existent BIP editors giving their public says on this
and their own motivations
- the BIP process is not a democracy, though everyone that has ever
contributed to the repository and who is still broadly active in
bitcoin has a material interest in the resolution of this issue.
if we check the gitlog there are like ~531 individual contributors
to the git tree. if we had people who are credited or thanks in the
BIPs documents we might have a rough 100 more people. it would be
legitimate to have the ones who have contributed, at least significantly
or meaningfully to have as say, without putting the process in a
situation of functional paralysis.
- give a chance to Luke or someone taking his defense to answer point
by point in public what are the motivations justifying his removal
of his BIP editor role, based on evidences if needed. giving him at least
2
weeks or even a full month would legitimate. he can always be temporarily
removed until there is a legit justification that has been answered from
his side.
- Murch was mentioning Luke's conflict of interest as a motivation to
remove him from his BIP editor. nothing says in BIP3 editor's
responsibilities that they should stay free from "conflict of interest".
however the very goal the BIP process is to have implementation inter-
compatibility therefore a shared set of logical rules executed the same
by all the implementation to have a common network. it would appear to
me that it's in the "spirit" of the BIP process that BIP editors have
a duty of neutrality with regards to how they fulfill their editors role
On this last point, I would strongly suggest to amend the BIP3 document
to underscore that editors have an explicit duty of neutrality, and that
under this duty they should not engage in the promotion of contentious
fork, even under one of their other hats (be it the maintainer of a
full-node
implementation or whatever). Otherwise it's lacking the good faith they
owe to the community under their BIP editor roles.
Bitcoin is at its heart a scientific project, science and engineering
made progress by the rationalized discussion of contradictory viewpoints.
No one can claim to have papal infaillability in this space, though if
you do so you're always free to go to build your own fork and church and
not to try to coerce people under your religion. By education, I'm sensible
in matters of freedom of consciousness.
I respect Luke's historical contributions in this space, so it's better for
the community to tread him with respect and fairness on this aspect, even if
it means taking a bit more time to resolve this issue and following more
formalities. We should not race to the bottom in matters of procedural
standards, and somehow acting in such a way it's closing surface for
ulterior contestations.
Finally, I would underscore we're in the middle of the month of August,
at a period where people can be in vacations, it's okay to be more lenient
on the time granted to resolute this issue. Some people might be on the
road for vacations, or between two transport (like me) and be usually a
bit less on their keyboard.
All my take and humble opinion only.
Best,
Antoine
OTS hash: 2dd0347a79c77bd2e56fa9587d0099baa9fcebccc688732e23c38fb4d99044fe
Le Sunday, August 9, 2026 à 11:35:19 PM UTC+1, Michael Tidwell a écrit :
> Luke,
>
> Thanks for the years of hard work. Genuinely appreciated.
>
> It's my opinion this is the right move. And, it would be better to step
> down yourself than get forced out through this informal process (Frankly
> it's embarrassing that this seems appropriate given your historic
> contributions). I believe it's apparent to most, (and I hope to you), that
> it's unlikely you would be working effectively with Core from here.
>
> There’s going to be a need for strong technical leader around
> decentralized mining at Ocean, and for a solid BIP editor if that new PoW
> chain happens. Whoever takes that on is going to need real conviction. Good
> luck with whatever comes next and whatever happens. Looking forward to what
> you building more amazing things at Ocean (again being genuine), so far
> y'all have made a splash, looking forward to the waves! (get it? because
> water and ocean.. anyways).
>
> Anyways for "communication", make sure you haven't accidentally blocked
> someone who you think has stopped communicating with you.. for instance if
> I wasn't blocked, I would have just sent this as a DM.
>
> Thanks,
> Tidwell
> On Sunday, August 9, 2026 at 3:50:52 PM UTC-4 Matt Corallo wrote:
>
>> I see no reason why he should not be removed.
>>
>> Matt
>>
>> On 8/9/26 2:29 PM, Murch wrote:
>> > Hello everyone,
>> >
>> > I recommend that Luke Dashjr be removed from the position of BIP
>> Editor.
>> >
>> > Over the past several years, Luke has been at the center of many
>> contentious disputes within the
>> > Bitcoin ecosystem, and this week a new forkcoin spun out of Bitcoin
>> under his leadership.
>> >
>> > More specifically, Luke was heavily involved in the creation and
>> implementation of BIP110, the
>> > proposal that led to the fork. During that process, he also exercised
>> his authority as a BIP Editor
>> > inconsistently with the established editorial process unfairly favoring
>> the proposal he was involved
>> > in. For example, he attempted to assign a BIP number to the draft
>> publicly on Twitter before the
>> > proposal had been discussed on the mailing list, and he merged a PR
>> updating the BIP within minutes
>> > of the PR being opened.
>> >
>> > The latter is particularly notable given that Luke has otherwise made
>> hardly any contributions to
>> > the day-to-day work of the BIP Editors since the additional editors
>> began serving in April 2024: he
>> > left fewer than 1% of the BIP Editor comments in the repository since
>> then, and the merge action of
>> > this PR was his first since May 2024.
>> >
>> > Communication between Luke and other BIP Editors had already broken
>> down last year, following a
>> > discussion about his attempt to side-step the process by prematurely
>> assigning a BIP number out of
>> > band.
>> >
>> > Taken together, I believe these circumstances raise serious concerns
>> about Luke continuing to hold
>> > editorial authority. In particular:
>> >
>> > - he has exercised his editorial privileges in a manner that raises
>> conflict-of-interest concerns;
>> > - he has contributed little to the ongoing workload of the BIP Editors;
>> > - his recent championing of a contentious soft fork that now appears to
>> evolve into a hard fork
>> > represents a complete departure from the Bitcoin development ecosystem;
>> and
>> > - trust, communication, and coordination with the other BIP Editors
>> have broken down.
>> >
>> > For these reasons, I motion that Luke be removed as a BIP Editor.
>> >
>> > Murch
>> >
>>
>>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2026-08-10 2:40 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2026-08-09 18:29 [bitcoindev] Motion to remove Luke Dashjr from BIP Editors Murch
2026-08-09 19:35 ` Luke Dashjr
2026-08-10 15:20 ` Murch
2026-08-09 19:47 ` Jameson Lopp
2026-08-09 19:48 ` Matt Corallo
2026-08-09 20:42 ` Michael Tidwell
2026-08-10 1:40 ` Antoine Riard [this message]
2026-08-09 20:56 ` Olaoluwa Osuntokun
2026-08-10 8:08 ` Jonas Nick
2026-08-10 15:05 ` Anthony Towns
2026-08-10 15:30 ` 'Antoine Poinsot' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2026-08-10 20:51 ` Bryan Bishop
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