News · Oct 22, 2026

Luke Dashjr is against the 180-day lock, but says he'll accept it

By xbt.live · 3 minute read

Bitcoin Knots maintainer Luke Dashjr says he is against extending XBT's coinbase lock, and would rather let it expire at block 979,920 next week. But he says the decision isn't his, the community "seems to clearly support it," and he will accept it. That points toward the 180-day rolling lock shipping in the next Knots release.

Quote card: Luke Dashjr, I am against this. But it's not my decision, and the Bitcoin community seems to clearly support it, so I will accept it.

What he said

Posting on X on Oct 22 (@LukeDashjr), quoting his own poll from two days earlier on what the community agrees on:

"Just to be perfectly clear: I am against this. I think we should let the long CBM expire in a week and move on, focus on building back what we lost.

But it's not my decision, and the Bitcoin community seems to clearly support it, so I will accept it."

He followed up with two more posts:

"Currently, all pools require DATUM in one way or form. As long as that continues, I don't think we need further consensus-level enforcement. If someone walks back later, we can always do a longer maturity + canceling payments at that time."

"Longer maturity doesn't have much purpose beyond making it possible to cancel payments. And much shorter than 1 year doesn't give enough time to coordinate the cancellations.

Ordinarily, all softforks should really be _released_ with a year lead time before activation..."

What it means

The 180-day lock is on track. PR #468 has three tested approvals, broad community support, and is already in the 29.4.3rc2 community test build. The maintainer saying he'll accept it removes the biggest open question. It still needs to be merged and released. What's in rc2
His case against it: pools already require DATUM, so the original goal is met; the real use of a long lock is to cancel bad actors' payments, and 180 days is too short to coordinate that; and soft forks normally deserve a year's notice, not ten days.
Voiding stays on the table, later. He describes "longer maturity + canceling payments" as a tool to use if pools walk back DATUM, not something needed now. The same debate ran through the #468 review thread, where several reviewers said they oppose voiding any mined reward.
Nothing changes for coins locked now. Under #468 or no change at all, the roughly 20,000 XBT locked since block 973,440 unlock at block 979,920, around Oct 31 to Nov 1. Live countdown

Our take

This is how it should work. The maintainer disagreed in public, gave his reasons, and deferred to what node runners and reviewers asked for. Whatever you think of 180 days, that's a healthier process than the one XBT left behind on the SHA-256 chain, where a few pools and companies decided BIP-110's fate.

All the lock options Unlock countdown

Sources: Luke Dashjr's posts on X, Oct 22, 2026; Bitcoin Knots PR #468 and the knots-dev 29.4.3rc2 release notes. "Our take" is xbt.live's opinion. Not financial advice.

Have an XBT story? Write for xbt.live.

Life support

So the patient was moved to the emergency room. In August, the SHA-256 miners left on their own chain, and the nodes enforcing BIP-110's rules kept going without them. At the end of the month, the rule-keeping chain switched its mining to BLAKE2b so the captured SHA-256 hash couldn't take it over. That chain is XBT. The full story is in How Bitcoin kept its rules and moved to BLAKE2b.

Patients on life support don't look healthy, and XBT doesn't either. About 102 XBT buy one BTC. It has had three bear markets in six weeks. That's what a rescue looks like from the outside. The people in the ER right now, the node runners, the miners, the builders shipping wallets and pools every week, are doing the work while the outcome is anything but certain. If the patient makes it, they're the ones who saved it.

The strangest part: you already own it

If you held bitcoin before Aug 8, 2026, you hold XBT. Same coins, same addresses, same keys. The proof of work that secured your coins for 17 years secures them on both chains, because the history is identical up to block 961,631. Every UTXO that existed before the split exists on XBT. The XBT you hold cost you exactly what your BTC cost you.

Since the split, the two histories have gone different ways. XBT's blocks follow BIP-110's rules: less data that isn't money, a cleaner chain going forward. Not sure what you hold? Check an address.

Two places at once

The body is still on the old chain: the brand, the network effect, the exchange listings, the ticker everyone knows. That doesn't disappear overnight, and we won't pretend it does.

But the thing that made Bitcoin worth caring about was never the brand. It was the idea: money that no state, no company and no small group of operators can change on users without their consent. That idea now lives on the chain whose users enforced their rules when it mattered. The body stayed. The soul moved.

Bitcoin was always a quiet way to separate money from the state. It still is. It just lives somewhere new.

Opinion. Not financial advice. XBT trades on thin markets and can lose most of its value quickly. Price figures as of the evening of Oct 10, 2026 (US Eastern).