Is Bitcoin’s neutrality under threat? According to private exchanges revealed by The Rage, Luke Dashjr is proposing a hard fork that would establish a multi-signature committee responsible for deleting illicit data from the blockchain. This radical measure calls into question the very foundations of the protocol.
A blockchain hard fork to “save Bitcoin”
Since early 2025, the Bitcoin community has been divided over OP_RETURN, a field that allows non-monetary data to be written to the blockchain. It all started when Bitcoin Core developers proposed, in version 0.30 expected in October, to remove the current 80-byte limit in order to reduce the impact of costly workarounds practiced by some users on nodes.
Conversely, Bitcoin Knots, maintained by Luke Dashjr, filters these transactions, which it considers “spam.” The tone of the debate has hardened, with personal attacks and memes, but it has also promoted the adoption of its alternative client: more than 20% of nodes now use Knots.
An article in The Rage reports on a leaked Signal conversation revealing Luke Dashjr’s new intentions: he is considering a Bitcoin hard fork to combat the hosting of illegal content on the blockchain, particularly child pornography.
Until now, the Bitcoin Knots client has allowed transactions containing OP_RETURN to be relayed, but this filtering does not prevent nodes from storing data included in blocks validated by consensus.
In light of this, Dashjr has proposed a radical measure: the creation of a trusted multisignature committee responsible for identifying and retroactively removing illegal content. The transactions concerned would be modified to replace the prohibited data with a cryptographic proof (zero-knowledge proof), thereby preserving the validity of the blocks.
When questioned by The Rage, Dashjr dismissed the article as “baseless lies.” Luke has not responded publicly since the article was published.
In response to the publication, Calle, the developer of Cashu and BitChat, stated:
“He scammed everyone into using Knots in order to impose changes on Bitcoin and realize his authoritarian and unhealthy vision of the world. Luke has completely lost his mind.”
What risks does Luke Dashjr’s proposal pose for Bitcoin?
Such a solution involves a hard fork, i.e., a change in the consensus rules that could split the blockchain into two separate chains.
However, this proposal raises serious concerns: it would introduce a form of retrospective censorship and undermine the neutrality and censorship resistance that are at the heart of Bitcoin.
Indeed, if a committee can delete certain data, there would be nothing to prevent it from extending its scope to other types of transactions deemed “undesirable,” potentially paving the way for regulatory compliance requirements (KYC/AML) or arbitrary censorship by the committee, which could in some way be corrupt.
If this project were to see the light of day, it would mark a major turning point in the history of Bitcoin, calling into question its founding principle: a decentralized network that is open to all, neutral, and immutable.
