Luke Dashjr
Luke Dashjr, known in the Bitcoin community as Luke-Jr, is a Bitcoin developer who has contributed to Bitcoin Core and the wider Bitcoin ecosystem since 2011.[1] He is the founder of the Eligius mining pool, the author of the BFGMiner mining software, and a former editor of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs).[1][2]
Career
Bitcoin Core Development
Dashjr has been contributing to Bitcoin Core since 2011.[1] He is credited with two early Bitcoin Improvement Proposals that shaped how mining software communicates with the network. BIP 22 added protocol support for long polling, a technique that allows a miner to be notified immediately when a new block template becomes available rather than repeatedly querying for one.[1] BIP 23 extended this work by allowing miners to check the basic validity of their next block before expending computational work on it, reducing the risk of accidental hard forks or of mining invalid blocks.[1]
Dashjr also maintains Bitcoin Knots, an alternative Bitcoin node implementation. In 2026 he announced the release of Bitcoin Knots version 29.4.2.knots20260508, describing it as further mitigating an ongoing attack on the network, and urged users to read the release notes and verify their downloads before installing.[3]
Mining Software and Pools
Beyond protocol development, Dashjr has been active in the tooling and infrastructure of Bitcoin mining. In 2014 he released BFGMiner, mining software that supports a wide range of mining hardware and runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux; weusecoins describes it as one of the most widely used implementations of Bitcoin mining software.[1]
He founded Eligius, described as one of the first Bitcoin mining pools. Eligius operates as an anonymous pool that requires no registration.[1] Dashjr has continued to hold operational roles in mining. He served as chair and chief technology officer of the mining pool Ocean, and he identifies himself as the chief executive officer of CONVOY_Mining.[2][3]
Role as BIP Editor
For many years Dashjr served as an editor of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, the formal process by which changes to Bitcoin are documented and standardized, and he maintained the BIPs repository on GitHub.[1][2] The editor role carries authority over assigning BIP numbers and merging changes into the shared repository, and additional BIP editors began serving alongside him in April 2024.[2]
In 2026 Bitcoin developer Mark Erhardt filed a motion documenting Dashjr's declining participation in that role. According to Erhardt, since the additional editors began serving in April 2024, Dashjr had left fewer than 1% of the BIP editor comments in the repository, and the merge action tied to the disputed proposal was his first merge since May 2024.[2] [4]
BIP-110 and Removal as Editor
Dashjr was one of the most prominent developers driving BIP-110, a controversial soft-fork proposal that sought to temporarily restrict use of the Bitcoin network for non-financial purposes.[2] The proposal would have established a breakaway Bitcoin chain that limited the storing of non-financial data such as images and text, a practice that became widespread following the arrival of the Ordinals protocol in 2023.[2]
Shortly after the attempt stalled, a motion calling for Dashjr's removal as a BIP editor was filed on August 9, 2026, and was subsequently forwarded and carried.[2] He was accused of abusing his editorial authority, including attempting to assign BIP-110 a BIP number before it had been discussed and quickly merging an update into the repository without following due process.[2] [5]
Dashjr responded on X, calling his removal "an abuse of power." He also announced that he was taking a sabbatical from his role as chair and chief technology officer of Ocean, stating that he would turn his immediate focus to working on Bitcoin and open-source projects to support Bitcoin.[2] [4]
In the period that followed, Dashjr publicly documented contentious chain events. In a September 5th post he described how a chain he called "Spamcoin" forked off from Bitcoin on August 8 in a contentious hard-fork attempt that removed or violated BIP-110 rules, and stated that on August 19th a project he referred to as "Purity" did the same by removing or replacing the difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA); he asserted that Bitcoin continued on in both cases.[3] He has also discussed proposals related to coinbase maturity — the rule that newly mined bitcoins cannot be spent for their first 100 blocks — including a soft fork to lengthen that maturity period, framing such changes as ways to deter large batches of mined coins from being spent quickly.[3] [4]
