Author: Ariel Lorenzo-Luaces 2021-02-18 05:43:10
Published on: 2021-02-18T05:43:10+00:00
The Bitcoin community has been discussing the activation of Taproot, and in particular, whether lockinontimeout (LOT) should be set to true or false. A recent meeting was held on IRC to explore this issue, which was open to all. However, despite majority support for LOT=false in the first meeting, the arguments hadn't been explored in depth, leading to a follow-up meeting focused solely on whether LOT should be set to true or false. The conversation log and video of the meeting are available online. The activation mechanism is a consensus change that can be contentious like any other change, and it must be resolved like any other change. Some voices in the discussion need to be more humble about what users must or must not run. If there is contention about whether Bitcoin should be stubborn or lenient with miners for Taproot and in the future, then some prefer not to activate anything at all. They are fine with calling Bitcoin ossified, accepting that SegWit is Bitcoin's last network upgrade. While Taproot is amazing, no new feature is worth a network split down the middle. In the recent meeting, only ~100 people showed up, which is hardly representative of the entire community. It seems inevitable that there won't be consensus on LOT, so everyone will have to choose for themselves. From one perspective, there was clearly more strong opposition from Bitcoin Core contributors, Lightning developers, and other community members against LOT=true than there was for LOT=false. Therefore, if they want to finalize Taproot activation parameters and propose them to the community at this time, their only option is to propose LOT=false. Any further delay appears counterproductive in their collective aim to get the Taproot soft fork activated as early as possible. Next week, the Bitcoin Core PR #19573 will undergo code review, which was initially delayed because of this LOT discussion. It will be loosely following the format of the Bitcoin Core PR review club and will be lower level and more technical. The meeting is planned for Tuesday, February 23rd, at 19:00 UTC on the IRC channel ##taproot-activation.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T18:01:57.674955+00:00