Bitcoin's development process has been broken for a long time and Bitcoin's developers have failed the community.
Developers have to start treating Bitcoin's users as stakeholders, not an audience they have contempt for.
I wrote the first Bitcoin Development Governance Proposal (BDGP-1).
This is a rough draft. If someone wants to work on it further/take the idea and write a better proposal, feel free to.
https://controlplanecapital.com/p/bitcoin-development-governance-proposal
Publish a target hardware budget with each release so users can verify that sovereignty remains practical.
Make bitcoin bureaucratic again
Bitcoin being too open to interpretation is kinda the reason for this ideological war. It used to be more tightly defined in the past, and now it’s loose to a point of lefty wokism.
Making some research on affordability of hardware is a good exercise for benchmarking purposes. Asfik no one has done a thorough analysis of how affordable hardware is now compared to 5 or 10 years ago. Affordability scope is a good measure for decentralisation scale. Currently we only look at metrics like hash rate growth or sheer node count, that are not reliable for the intended purposes.
Not finished reading but I really like that you thought about this:
“One change per Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)”
BIPs stuffed to the brim with changes have the same effect/feel to the MEGA bills passed by congress and we all know how fucked up these are. So we either ship consecutive BIPs together or just one at the time. Otherwise we risk getting distracted by a certain change while completely ignoring the rest.
nostr:nprofile1qqs8fl79rnpsz5x00xmvkvtd8g2u7ve2k2dr3lkfadyy4v24r4k3s4spz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctc9e4umg nostr:nprofile1qqs0m40g76hqmwqhhc9hrk3qfxxpsp5k3k9xgk24nsjf7v305u6xffcpremhxue69uhkummnw3ez6ur4vgh8wetvd3hhyer9wghxuet59uqsuamnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dshs7w3yfd you may wanna take a look at this draft and lean on it.
nostr:nevent1qqsvepp4afwlxda5let8wvyfpu7m867f6nr4e9v7xznk3f3w4th9guqvepqhx
That’s a pretty good draft imo. Instead of Constitution of Governance, I’d propose a Declaration of Governance. Declaration is a less complicated and more straightforward. Might reduce the need for interpretation by an order of legal clerics.
I don't see how that can be enforced. The only real option in my mind is to have other implementations.
Yes, you can't tell people what code to write/not write.
It's more about having the Bitcoin community try to define what code they want to run and then funding new implementations that are willing to follow at least some of the rules.
There can also be bounties for devs who read the opensource repo and find bugs/find places where the agreed upon rules are not being followed.
For example, Bitcoin Core removed the definition of Bitcoin from their GitHub repository, so they're changing something they can't define or won't define because their definition might get backlash.
You need to at least define what Bitcoin is, what is changeable, what is not changeable to be considered a serious implementation.
But to be clear, I wrote the article as a draft, in like 1 hour, in a busy morning. I was hoping that someone (with a larger audience) would take some of the ideas and write a better one.
I agree with most points you mentioned. I would be very tempted to define it simply as :
- No changes unless to fix an existential bug or problem (possibly quantum at some point).
A third implementation that is extremely conservative would be wonderful in my opinion. It would probably have to start with Core version 28 (no later than v28).
Adam Simecka seems to feel that way too and he has a fairly substantial presence on X, but I can't find him here on Nostr.
https://xcancel.com/AdamSimecka/status/1985405874031194290#m
Agreed.
The issue that has to be considered is you don't want to ossify into brittleness.
