Motion to remove Luke Dashjr from BIP Editors

[Murch]

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

[Luke Dashjr]

These are false accusations. I have followed the BIP process
consistently for years. Your novice opinions alone do not establish new
processes.

You are the one who stopped communicating, not I.

You are the one who should be removed.

Luke

[Jameson Lopp]

This is unprecedented because there is, to my knowledge, no formal governance structure or policy around management of BIP Editors.

I see no need to rehash the lengthy list of disputes in which Luke has been involved; it seems to me that ultimately this comes down to reputation.

In my view, Luke has proven himself to be poorly suited to working well with others. It's nearly impossible for him to communicate clearly because he often operates under completely different definitions of terms than are standard, and this twisting of terminology seems to be his modus operandi for remaining "honest" (in his view) while making outrageous statements.

Beyond that, his open hostility and animosity toward fellow contributors and often even the whole of Bitcoin Core as an organization make it incredibly puzzling to me why he should have any association with it whatsoever.

This isn't a democracy and I have no vote. But it seems to me that if the other BIP Editors are uninterested in continuing to work with Luke, they are under no obligation to leave privileged access open for him to potentially abuse.

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[Matt Corallo]

I see no reason why he should not be removed.

Matt

[Olaoluwa Osuntokun]

Hi Murch,

I second this motion.

Luke put forth a proposal, then went on to receive direct and substantial
technical feedback from all across the ecosystem, but rather than faithfully
engaging with such feedback (we're all liars ofc), he used his position as a
BIP editor to fast track the proposal anyway, assigning it a number out of band
(thereby side stepping the normal procedure), all while contributing next to
nothing to the day-to-day work of the other BIP editors.

I think it's worth being very explicit w.r.t this motion. This isn't about
"punishing" a developer for advocating a fork. Devs are ofc free to champion
any idea, no matter how dumb or contentious they are, forking if they deem it
necessary. Rather this is about whether someone who bypasses all editorial
processes when it benefits them, cannot maintain a normal working relationship
with his co-editors, and now is the head of a project hellbent on creating a
new alt-coin (after their failed fork) can be trusted with an editorial
position within Bitcoin's standard process. It should be clear to anyone
reading this, that he cannot.

His persistent fork also creates a clear conflict of interest: Luke is now the
leader of a project that seeks to undermine Bitcoin itself (you fool, don't you
see, bcash jr is the real Bitcoin!), a standing BIP editor shouldn't have a
direct stake in such a project.

-- Laolu