Michael Saylor: Bitcoin Code Is a Structure, Adjustments Are Assaults on 'Financial Rights' – Decrypt

Michael Saylor is not preventing BIP-110 anymore—he is preventing the very concept that Bitcoin’s code will be modified. The Technique govt chairman posted a nine-post thread to X on Tuesday that reframes your entire protocol debate as a constitutional disaster.

“Bitcoin has received. Now it should survive victory,” Saylor wrote on X. “Its gravest risk is just not an enemy on the gates, however corruption from inside: factions that invent pretexts, rewrite the principles, and seize financial rights till freedom turns into permission and legislation turns into loot.”

Saylor has been attacking a Bitcoin Enchancment Proposal dubbed BIP-110 particularly. The “Decreased Knowledge Non permanent Softfork” proposal that might prohibit non-financial information like Ordinals inscriptions from Bitcoin’s blockchain for round one 12 months. Final week, Saylor posted a 110-point essay opposing it below the title “110 Causes BIP 110 Is a Unhealthy Thought.”

Primarily based on the present standing of the proposal, his perspective appears to have prevailed. Now Saylor lumped BIP-110 along with covenants—good contract-style restrictions that might let customers pre-program how their Bitcoin will be spent sooner or later—and larger-block proposals, which name for growing how a lot information suits in every block to course of extra transactions. His verdict on all of them: completely different concepts, identical crime.

“Some proposals, like BIP-110, censor legitimate fee-paying transactions. Others add covenant equipment. Others demand bigger blocks,” he wrote. “Completely different devices, identical constitutional offense: a faction rewrites Bitcoin’s guidelines and imposes its agenda, prices, and dangers on everybody.”

The constitutional metaphor is doing actual work right here. Bitcoin’s consensus guidelines—the shared algorithm all nodes and miners agree on to find out what counts as a sound transaction—are the practical equal of a rustic’s founding legislation in Saylor’s framing. Rewrite them for any faction’s ideological preferences, he argues, and you are not simply updating software program. You are confiscating individuals’s financial rights.

“Bitcoin’s consensus guidelines are its structure,” he wrote. “To rewrite them for the comfort of any faction is to assault the financial rights of each participant right now and each technology to come back.”

“Protocol adjustments have to be uncommon, conservative, and pushed by necessity, not ambition. Defend Bitcoin’s structure. Defend the longer term,” he wrote.

BIP-110’s principal advocate is its pseudonymous writer Dathon Ohm with longtime Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr being a key participant within the writing of the unique draft. The proposal is supported primarily by a comparatively small “anti-spam” constituency round Bitcoin Knots and node operators who imagine Bitcoin ought to stay targeted on peer-to-peer cash relatively than changing into a everlasting storage layer for issues like Ordinals, tokens, photographs, and different arbitrary information.

The argument is that miners gather a one time payment for together with these payloads, whereas each full node operator has to bear the long-term storage, bandwidth and validation prices. From their perspective this isn’t censorship per se, however extra a safety of a scarce public useful resource (i.e., the blockchain’s capability)

BIP-110’s necessary signaling window—the purpose at which nodes working the proposal’s software program start rejecting non-compliant blocks—opens round August 9, at block 961,632. Miner help sits at 2.64%, in line with the BIP-110 signaling dashboard, effectively wanting the 55% required for activation.