The vibe I'm getting is that neither Core 30 nor Knots can kill Bitcoin. And a fork will never happen.
Discussion
It might not chain fork, but I think there is a real possibility someone will open the floodgates woth a standardness rules fork of 29 or earlier that is less...Luke-y. Once that repo exists, denominations will begin breaking off with their "true vision" of what spam is.
I like the idea of lots of node implementations. It protects against this drama where you only have core or knots.
Yeahhh but from a practical software maintenance standpoint, there are risks.
Core's benefit is that it has a lot of eyeballs on the problem and extremely (and culturally calcified) review standards. It's like one company building all the railroads to extremely exacting standards. Everyone benefits from the smooth rides and reliably delivery schedules.
Breaking that tradition comes with tradeoffs. Less disciplined or scrupulous project maintainers can hide their lower standards or outright malicious agendas with affinity marketing, community-building, and Core conspiracy-mongering (think Roger Ver). And unlike altcoin projects, we still have to ride on their rails.
The problem is that Core it's now brimming with academics all eager to treat Bitcoin like a grant program -- they don't really give a fuck if there are practical limits to what Bitcoin should do that actually add to the value proposition. Thry dont live on Bitcoin. Theyre not heavily invested in its success. They wjist ant to do computer science, and Bitcoin is a great lab in which they can make a name for themselves.
The upside to lots of code forks is that Core will now be so occupied trying to mitigate all the little incompatibities between their project and other implementations. That will siphon away their energy and appetite for building all their dumb wonk academic hobby horses.
My argument for many node implementations is mainly based on the fact that Bitcoin is a protocol. A node implementations only needs to implement the protocol.
But because all the eyes have been on Core for so long, the protocol has become so bloated and complex that it's the only game in town. There'll come a time when that bloat will cause Core to either collapse or become unmaintainable.
What's better? All eyes on Core, where only a handful of devs can manage the complexity; or a hundred times more eyes on a hundred different node implementations?
We're at a point where Core is so stable on the network, that alternative implementations can be made from scratch that either find themselves compatible with the overall network or not. The eye of nature is worth even more than the eyes of a hundred devs.
Only the runners of alternative nodes run the risk of whatever bugs there might be. But I just can't get over the fact that a protocol somehow only has one implementation in wide use, and I think that monoculture is more a risk than diversity.
There are two major lightning node implementations. So the pool of talents is now split. There are less eyes on wither project than there could be. There are competing agendas. And it's an extremely complex protocol where bugs from incompatibites are constantly arising, to the detriment of the users' experiences.
I'd rather that than everyone trying to fight for consensus in a single codebase, even though that's the most "efficient" way to do it. But I don't think efficiency helps a decentralized system grow strong, however frustrating that is.
And even if there were only one lightning implementation, you still need people to update their nodes to expand the protocol. But people tend to update blindly. If there were a more diverse ecosystem, one update in one implementation wouldn't put the whole system at risk.
Is it possible that the protocol is even anti-fragile in the face of dev and maintainer Human-ness?
I think so. The existence of Knots implies the existence of many other forks in the future. As more people adopt Bitcoin, there will be more organizations that feel they need to control the node software they run and make themselves immune to policy disputes.
I ran Knots for a long time but I stopped listening to Knots side since the recent emergency FUD.
I always find urgency to be the precursor to some kind of scam.
In all this hoopla I actually downgraded core. I still need to rebuild a lightning node on top of it though, to extricate myself from Start9.
Exactly. Bitcoin is unstoppable. Code forks may come and go, but the network, the consensus, and the sound money ethos remain invincible. HODL strong.