Reddit moderator bans Knots leader from r/Bitcoin

Knots leader Bitcoin Mechanic, aka “GrassFedBitcoin,” was banned from Reddit’s most popular Bitcoin community on Sunday after posting about the contentious BIP-110.

BIP-110 attempts to limit non-monetary data on Bitcoin like images, documents, and other inscriptions and, according to moderators, posting about it in the r/Bitcoin subreddit breaks a long-standing rule against promoting protocol changes that lack broad agreement.

Bitcoin Mechanic posted just two sentences: “7 blocks in the last difficulty period flipped version bit 4. I wonder what they’re signalling for?”

However, even this was enough to cause moderators to immediately remove the post and permanently ban his account

“I expected them to delete the post, didn’t expect them to ban my account,” he posted on Sunday alongside a video about the removal. It drew 40,000 views within hours on X, plus thousands more on YouTube.

“I know that they ban all mention of Knots and BIP-110. I know that already,” he said. “They have that as an unwritten but official policy at this point.”

He also claimed that he was simply describing an “on-chain reality.”

However, Reddit moderator BashCo tapped the sign and told Bitcoin Mechanic that the established rules meant the outcome should have been obvious.

What was Bitcoin Mechanic trying to say — and why was it a problem?

The current dispute continues a multi-year feud over what type of speech is permitted on r/Bitcoin.

Rules about acceptable speech on this subreddit matter because it’s one of the most visible Bitcoin communities outside of X.

Its moderation has been a flashpoint since the blocksize wars of 2015-2017, when the forum’s administrators were accused of scrubbing dissent during blocksize scaling debates.

In the context of Bip-110 — the latest escalation in Bitcoin’s long-running OP_RETURN war, which Protos chronicled in detail — blocks by miners whose version has bit 4 set “yes” are signaling a type of vote for activating BIP‑110.

Version bit 4 means that the fifth bit (counting from 0) in the 32‑bit nVersion field is being used by BIP‑110’s deployment logic as that miner’s signal that they’re ready to enforce the BIP‑110 rules.

Bitcoin developer Dathon Ohm wrote the first version of BIP-110, floating it as BIP-444. Originally, node operators who activated it would have limited data unrelated to the on-chain movement of BTC within OP_RETURN outputs to less than 90 bytes of data.

It targeted inscription protocols like Ordinals and Runes that Ohm and the Knots community, including Bitcoin Mechanic and Luke Dashjr, dismiss as spam.

Protos has previously documented how the fight went nuclear when the blockchain fork idea first surfaced.

Whether Bitcoin Mechanic’s post was promotion or neutral reporting of on-chain activity is a microcosm of the Bitcoin Core versus Knots feud.

To moderators of the subreddit, signaling support for an unactivated fork is unacceptable promotion. To fans of Knots and/or BIP-110, as well as many agnostics, reporting that a newsworthy number of miners flipped version bit 4 in their blocks is an act of journalism.