Luke Dashjr floated two temporary changes to Bitcoin's reward rules on Sept. 10, 2026: zeroing the block subsidy for about 30 days, or extending coinbase maturity from 100 to 4,375 blocks. Neither has a BIP number, client, or activation method, and Dashjr said both are temporary and not final.
Two ideas for temporarily rewriting how Bitcoin pays its miners went public on Sept. 10, 2026, both posted by Luke Dashjr, the developer who has spent years arguing that hashpower running only for profit is weakening the network. One would hold the block subsidy at zero for roughly a month, leaving transaction fees as the only miner revenue. The other would leave the 3.125 BTC subsidy in place and instead make miners wait about 30.4 days before spending it.
Dashjr, chief executive of CONVOY Mining, published both at 09:09:47 UTC and clarified 27 minutes later that neither is final and both would be temporary. Mined bitcoin is already unspendable for its first 100 blocks, roughly 16 hours and 40 minutes at the network's 10-minute target. He wrote that proposals exist to either stretch that lock to 4,375 blocks or to zero the subsidy for a month "so miners only get paid fees and nothing more," describing the motive as deterring "a large batch of hashers who appear to only have profit as their motive, and are attacking Bitcoin's decentralization in the process."
The subsidy has stood at 3.125 BTC per block since the April 20, 2024 halving at height 840,000. Zeroing it for 30 days would skip roughly 4,320 blocks of issuance, or about 13,500 BTC that would otherwise enter circulation in that window — an arithmetic consequence of the current schedule, not a figure Dashjr published. The next halving remains scheduled for height 1,050,000, projected for early 2028, when the subsidy falls to 1.5625 BTC. Neither idea as described alters the 21 million supply cap; a temporary zero subsidy would delay issuance rather than cancel it.
The sharper of the two proposals lands on a network whose fee base is thin. Public block explorers on Sept. 10 showed fees at well under 1% of typical block rewards, a share that has stayed low for long stretches since the 2024 halving. A 30-day fee-only window would therefore test the security budget directly, and it would bite hardest on publicly listed miners and highly leveraged operators rather than hobbyists who already wait on pool payouts.
The 100-block rule exists so a shallow chain reorganization cannot erase coins someone has already spent. Stretching it to 4,375 blocks leaves the subsidy and fees intact in the coinbase output and simply makes miners wait about a month to move them. That raises the working capital cost for anyone who needs to sell subsidy coins quickly, without touching issuance timing.
Replies split along that line. Seneca Leland, a self-described solo miner running two Goldshell HS Box units, backed delayed spending and said he was bidding to buy hashrate at power cost, wear, and a small premium. XBT Motorist preferred a longer maturity lock to a subsidy change, arguing that touching the issuance schedule would not work as a long-term fix. Taimour AlNeimat called profit-motivated miners part of the incentive model, said extending maturity is worth discussing, and described a zero subsidy as much riskier. Jeffrey McDonnell wrote that miners are supposed to act in their financial interest.
Others questioned whether the change is needed at all. Scotthew82 said DATUM adoption and individual pool shares falling below 30% may already be doing the work, and that the proposal is more useful as a standby than as an immediate change. BTCLeukocyte_WR asked whether DATUM already solves template centralization and whether the mechanism would be a soft fork. Stephen P wrote that a bad actor does not care about spending the coins, and warned the change could open an attack.
The framing tracks an argument Dashjr has made for years: that hashpower submitting work under Stratum v1 without building its own block template is not mining in the sense Bitcoin's early design intended. CONVOY's DATUM product, short for Decentralized Alternative Templates for Universal Mining, is built so the hasher constructs the block template while the pool only reduces payout variance. Dashjr is no longer speaking from inside OCEAN — Mummolin Inc. announced his resignation as chairman, chief technology officer and director on Aug. 29, 2026, repurchasing all of his equity, with both sides citing different visions for Bitcoin mining after recent protocol developments.
That exit followed a governance fight that sets the context for a narrower proposal. BIP editors removed Dashjr from the BIP repository on Aug. 10, 2026, after Mark "Murch" Erhardt filed a motion the evening of Aug. 9. BIP-110, the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork tied to that fight, peaked at about 2.53% of signaling against a 55% threshold. A later BLAKE2b proof-of-work fork associated with Dashjr's camp drew limited miner or exchange support after a Sept. 1 start.
What is missing is the machinery. Dashjr did not attach a BIP number, link a Delving Bitcoin thread, name a client, or specify an activation method. He did not say how a month would be measured if blocks run fast or slow, or how honest miners already holding immature coinbase outputs would be treated at the start of a window. He also did not identify the "large batch of hashers" by pool name or hashrate share. Either change would require a consensus rule update, and the posts do not say how, or whether, that would be deployed.
For miners, the practical read is that a maturity extension is a liquidity question and a subsidy cut is a revenue question, and only the second one changes the network's security budget for the duration. For the wider market, the near-term effect runs through governance rather than issuance: a proposal with no BIP, no client and no activation path cannot move supply, but it can keep the miner-incentive debate alive into the next halving cycle in early 2028.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
