Bitcoin Governance Fight Heats Up Over BIP-110 and Luke Dashjr
Bailey points to a 2014 blacklist incident while Dashjr backs BIP-110 against Ordinals inscriptions. The debate centers on Bitcoin governance and the risk of another split.
Key Takeaways
- David Bailey brought up a 2014 conflict involving Luke Dashjr again as the debate over BIP-110 heats up.
- BIP-110 aims to limit arbitrary data in Bitcoin transactions for about a year and has seen little support so far.
- The issue gets at how much influence developers, miners, and node operators should have over Bitcoin governance.
Nakamoto CEO David Bailey has dragged an old 2014 dispute back into the conversation as he turns up the pressure on Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr, just as the fight over BIP-110 is picking up speed. The bigger issue is not just one proposal. It is who gets to shape Bitcoin, and how much power that group should have.
Old blacklist dispute
On Friday, Bailey highlighted a 2014 episode in which Dashjr allegedly added address blacklists in secret to the Gentoo Linux build he maintained. The setting was enabled by default, which meant payments to services such as SatoshiDice were blocked in that version of Bitcoin software.
Node operators did not catch on until transactions began to fail, and the backlash came quickly. At the time, a Core developer argued that changes like that should not be included in the default software and instead belong in a separately labeled release. Dashjr later changed the default, made the blacklist optional, and apologized. Bitcoin Core never shipped that blacklist itself.
BIP-110 raises the pressure
That old dispute matters more now because Dashjr supports BIP-110, also called Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, which would restrict arbitrary data in transactions for about a year. The proposal is aimed at Ordinals inscriptions, where users attach images and text to Bitcoin. Supporters call that spam, while critics see it as an unnecessary intrusion into the network.
Dashjr also runs Bitcoin Knots, an alternative software client that already applies the limit. According to data, Knots ran in 2025 on about one-fifth of public nodes during the spam fight. Miners can trigger the change by signaling support in the blocks they mine, but BIP-110 needs 55 percent and has remained below 1 percent since December 2025, with a high of 0.79 percent.
The timing is delicate. Beginning in early August, nodes using the software can reject blocks that do not signal support, which is similar to the SegWit upgrade in 2017. Back then, the market had broad support behind the change, but BIP-110 does not have that kind of backing yet.
Why this matters for Bitcoin
For crypto readers, the larger question is how much Bitcoin can change before social consensus starts to break down. That is not only a technical issue. It is also a governance question that could determine how developers, miners, and node operators keep one another in check.
Some prominent critics are already warning about the risks. MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor called it a self-imposed protocol risk, while Blockstream founder Adam Back warned about fork risk. Bailey went a step further and said Wall Street, in his view, does not understand how Bitcoin governance works, then raised the pointed question of how cash-settled CME futures should decide which chain is the real Bitcoin.
Bitcoin’s market value is about $1.3 trillion (€1.1 trillion), but this debate shows that even at that scale, a governance fight can still come down to a relatively small group of developers and operators. Dashjr is also not the only maintainer of Bitcoin Core, though his direct influence runs through Knots and the people who use it.
