Last night, Bitcoin Twitter went nuclear after a report from The Rage claimed Luke Dashjr is ideating on a Bitcoin “hard fork.” One of Bitcoin’s most prominent developers, Dashjr has been working on a solution to scrub illicit photos from Bitcoin’s blockchain while keeping the transaction trail intact using Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), the Rage claims.
For those who have been following Blockspace, you know that Luke Dashjr has been the leading proponent for censorship of Bitcoin transactions that include arbitrary data for Bitcoin NFTs (a.k.a. ordinals/inscriptions) and metaprotocol tokens.
Luke Dashjr’s mining pool, OCEAN, and his alternative implementation to Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Knots, have been Dashjr’s principal weapons in this fight, with both primarily weaponized by a clique of Bitcoin plebs who fall in line upon hearing flattering, feel-good marketing speak about decentralizing bitcoin.
Neither OCEAN nor Knots offer filters effective enough for Luke, and the texts leaked to The Rage suggest he’s at least in the early stages of thinking about a nuclear option to, in his own words (allegedly), “save Bitcoin.”
It’s important to note that Luke hasn’t proposed anything formal, but in the text, he does lay out a scheme for a change to Bitcoin that would allow a council to retroactively remove Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) transactions from the blockchain.
As far as I understand it, this is an update that would probably only affect Bitcoin Knots nodes (Luke was not explicit in the message about whether he referred to Bitcoin Core or Knots, but I think it’s safe to assume the latter).
So this would not create a hardfork or a chain-split for Bitcoin. Instead, every time there is a flagged transaction, it will be removed after a short (~1 hour or so) delay after it’s confirmed, and then all Knots nodes will resync with the updated chain.
This is “technically a hardfork,” as Dashjr says in the texts, but it would seemingly only affect Knots node runners.
That said, how exactly this would would work, who would sit on the multi-sig council to decide what to remove (and who would select them/how they would be selected), and how the ZK proof would work are all still very much a mystery.
There are still a plethora of unanswered questions and nuances to work through to flesh this embryonic, text-bred idea into a fully-toned proposal to change Bitcoin. What’s more, I doubt many people will go along with such a Rube Goldberg solution – how exactly, for e.g., will we manage the ZK proofs? – for a problem that no one is talking about.
But one which, apparently, Luke Dashjr is trying to make everyone’s problem. Perhaps the most consequential part of Dashjr’s Signal exchange comes at the end when he mentions a legal letter being drafted by third parties – so as to not be associated with OCEAN – to push for sanctioning illicit content like CSAM on Bitcoin.
If this is true – and Blockstream CEO Adam Back mentioned that he has heard of OCEAN contacting rival pools to lobby this – then Dashjr’s proposal almost looks like selling insurance while you lay down kindling for the fire.
Whether it is dogma, pride, ambition, or something else, there is no reason to bring eyeballs to a problem that hasn’t been one – especially when the solution sets a precedent for transaction censorship that could be all-too convenient for State actors in other circumstances.
