Luke Dashjr, the Biggest Anti-Spammer of Bitcoin, Inscribed Phrases on the Network in 2011

• Messages were inserted as free text in the coinbase transaction.
• Dashjr is a maintainer of the Bitcoin Knots client, which opposes the non-monetary use of Bitcoin.

The analyst known on X as Leonidas accused developer Luke Dashjr of having inserted arbitrary data in text message format in a Bitcoin transaction since block 139,690 on August 5, 2011, a practice that Dashjr currently combats as he considers it "spam" for using the network as storage rather than for strictly monetary uses.

The following screenshot shared by Leonidas shows a block explorer with the coinbase transaction of block 139,690, the first transaction of each block, through which the miner receives the newly created reward. There, one can see (red box) the Latin phrase "Eligius/Benedictus Deus. Benedictum Nomen Sanctum eius", which means "Eligius / Blessed be God. Blessed be His Holy Name".
"Eligius / Blessed be God. Blessed be His Holy Name" is the phrase that Dashjr allegedly inserted in block 139,690. Source: Leonidas / X.

The Latin text was inserted as a miner message, a free text field that any operator of a pool can write within the coinbase transaction without the need for any additional protocol. Unlike an Ordinals inscription that permanently stores images or larger files, a miner message occupies only a few bytes and does not require any special software to create or read it.

Furthermore, according to Leonidas's account, Luke added more texts and similar data in other blocks, for example at heights 139,717, 139,792, 139,831, among others.

This means that not only did Luke use the Bitcoin network to host arbitrary data, but he was also the one who started the "spam" movement.

Leonidas, analyst of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Leonidas, in his post on X on July 7, stated that Dashjr "was not only a 'spammer', but also seems to have built a service that allowed others to spam the network." According to this analyst, in block 142573, mined by Eligius, someone allegedly used that service to inscribe the message "Militant atheists, happy now?", which Leonidas claimed hid a link to a "rickroll", an internet joke that redirects to a music video. Leonidas asserted that Dashjr "tried to hide this information from his followers for over a decade, hoping it would never be found."

Dashjr is one of the oldest developers of Bitcoin. He founded Eligius in 2011 and today runs Ocean, another mining pool, in addition to maintaining Bitcoin Knots, software that filters transactions with arbitrary data and imposes stricter restrictions than the Core reference client.

This stance made Dashjr one of the most visible faces of BIP-110 (temporary soft fork of reduced data), a proposal that would restrict the insertion of non-financial data in Bitcoin for one year. The credited author of the proposal signs under the pseudonym Dathon Ohm, but part of the community pointed to Dashjr as its true creator.
For LuckDashjr, only the approval of BIP-110 will ensure Bitcoin's survival.

BIP-110 faces its decisive phase on August 8. That day begins, in block 961,632, a mandatory signaling window in which nodes running compatible software will reject as invalid the blocks from any miner that does not include the backup signal, under the mechanism known as user-activated soft fork (UASF).

This design guarantees the locking of the rule no later than block 963,648 and its entry into force at 965,664, around early September, regardless of how much voluntary support it gathers among miners.

In this context, Jameson Lopp, co-founder of Casa and Bitcoin developer, pointed out that the 55% threshold required by BIP-110 is well below the 95% used in previous Bitcoin changes, which raises the risk of the network splitting into two incompatible versions if support remains as low as it currently is, below 1% of the total computing power.

Finally, Leonidas described Dashjr as a "fraud" and "liar", claiming to have discovered "a secret so astonishing that it will amaze even the most devoted followers" of the developer. According to the analyst, the messages "undermine Luke's integrity" and raise doubts about "the legitimacy of the entire BIP-110 proposal," as he believes the practice began "more than ten years" before the first inscriptions of the Ordinals protocol, in January 2023.