Michael Saylor argues Bitcoin protocol changes constitute attacks on economic rights, extending his opposition beyond BIP-110 to covenants and block size upgrades.
Regulation & Gov ·
Michael Saylor has expressed opposition to several proposed modifications to Bitcoin's consensus layer, framing such changes as threats to the network's foundational security model. The Strategy founder characterized Bitcoin's consensus rules as comparable to constitutional law and specifically objected to initiatives such as BIP-110, covenant expansions, and block size increases, contending that these modifications risk diminishing transaction sovereignty, reducing scarcity of block capacity, degrading network resilience, and expanding both operational and security burdens.
Saylor's argument centers on the economics of long-term mining incentives. As subsidy payouts decline by half every 210,000 blocks, he warned that miners will increasingly depend on transaction fees rather than block rewards to justify their operational costs. Any policy that undermines the fee market's strength, he suggested, could jeopardize the security guarantees Bitcoin aims to provide over decades.
His position advocates for restraint: maintaining Bitcoin's base layer in a minimal, impartial state focused on core functions while directing development and experimentation upward to higher-layer solutions. Protocol adjustments, in his view, should occur infrequently and with careful deliberation. The broader risk he identifies is fragmentation within the development community itself—factions introducing rule changes that effectively reallocate or constrain economic rights.