Michael Saylor: Bitcoin Code Is a Structure, Modifications Are Assaults on ‘Financial Rights’

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

“Bitcoin has received. Now it should survive victory,” Saylor wrote on X. “Its gravest risk just isn’t 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 regulation turns into loot.”



Saylor has been attacking a Bitcoin Enchancment Proposal dubbed BIP-110 particularly. The “Diminished Information Short-term Softfork” proposal that may prohibit non-financial knowledge 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 Dangerous Thought.”

Primarily based on the present standing of the proposal, his viewpoint appears to have prevailed. Now Saylor lumped BIP-110 along with covenants—good contract-style restrictions that may let customers pre-program how their Bitcoin may be spent sooner or later—and larger-block proposals, which name for rising how a lot knowledge matches 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. “Totally 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 legitimate transaction—are the purposeful equal of a rustic’s founding regulation 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 folks’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 at present and each era to return.”

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

BIP-110’s principal advocate is its pseudonymous creator 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 centered on peer-to-peer cash slightly than turning into a everlasting storage layer for issues like Ordinals, tokens, photographs, and different arbitrary knowledge.

The argument is that miners gather a one time charge 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 operating the proposal’s software program start rejecting non-compliant blocks—opens round August 9, at block 961,632. Miner help sits at 2.64%, based on the BIP-110 signaling dashboard, properly wanting the 55% required for activation.