I think i agree with basically *all* of James' post here.
https://twitter.com/jamesob/status/1857049961235403101
Including the part at the end, where he doesn't have any solution ...
Discussion
I don’t understand the focus on Bitcoin Core. Node runners like myself would pay attention If a large enough coalition of technically competent Bitcoiners like you and James converged on a specific proposal. What I see from the outside is a lack of consensus in the technical community.
Really? His claim is mostly that there’s this clear consensus for various protocol changes for Bitcoin that aren’t happening because of “lack of leadership” in Bitcoin Core. But I’m really really struggling to see where that consensus is, and for what it is.
There’s nothing that requires someone contributing to Bitcoin Core regularly to lead the charge for creating consensus around a protocol change, and I’m happy others are trying, but nearly everything I’ve seen people pushing is just very very clearly not at the level of consensus yet.
That doesn’t imply that somehow Bitcoin Core contributors are at fault (or responsible for creating consensus around other peoples’ ideas), maybe the ideas just aren’t mature yet.
Appreciate your input.
On the last part, that illustrates a big difference in perspective - while I totally get that you could read his post as a criticism of various Core devs for 'blocking' or similar, I didn't read it like that; I feel like he's mostly describing that the dynamics don't allow consensus to be reached.
It's all hard to define but I don't see how we're going to get to the kind of consensus you're describing or looking for.
As a concrete-ish example, take op_ctv, how much of the nonconsensus is 'we're not at all ready to say a different version of this idea isn't better?'. How much weight is given to the philosophical perspective of those who don't even *want* covenants? I have no idea how to do that, or if I should want to. Overall the bar just seems insanely high for any *meaningful* soft fork change.
I'm speaking as an outsider mostly of course, so my opinion on these things needs a big caveat.
The dynamic he’s describing (where you have to convince “Core”) strikes me as an incredibly weird way of viewing it, though - it’s just a group of developers working on one project. I don’t really understand this perspective at all, tbh.
In terms of “well why didn’t CTV happen”, I responded on Twitter, but there’s nontrivial risk to the act of doing a fork in Bitcoin. That has to be weighed against the value of any fork. For me personally, I didn’t see a single use for CTV that was even remotely compelling (not like I wouldn’t use it, but I don’t think anyone will use it) until Timeout Trees, at which point every has given up on CTV.
I don’t think “well clearly we’re just not getting anything” is the right way to look at it. From where I sit, the attempts at adding covenant features to Bitcoin have been half-assed at best.
Everything that uses pre-signed transactions gets improved with CTV. There is nothing complex in understanding this part.
Personally, I would use joinpool: https://gist.github.com/harding/a30864d0315a0cebd7de3732f5bd88f0
I have experimented with the idea on signet and it improves coinjoin.
Most things that use pre-signed transactions want to update them (eg lightning), which doesn’t work with CTV.
I pretty much completely disagree (no surprise there). My thoughts are reflected in these rebuttals: