Author: Billy Tetrud 2022-01-19 02:26:12
Published on: 2022-01-19T02:26:12+00:00
In an email exchange, a member of the Bitcoin community expressed their opinion on various topics related to the network's consensus changes. They argued that soft forks should be done as and when required, that activating multiple consensus changes in a bundle is not safer than having multiple separate in-flight soft forks at once, and that BIP 8 with LOT=TRUE was a better activation mechanism option in Taproot but some influential developers wrote it off as misleading and unsafe on social media. They also disagreed with the idea of coming to a consensus as a community on what the minimum time between soft forks should be. In response, the other person disagreed with some of their points and argued that there is a reasonable argument to be made that maybe bitcoin needs to move faster now than it should in the future, and the cost of having the community remain vigilant against harmful changes is worth the extra speed. They also disagreed with the notion that it's not possible to have cultural norms in a decentralized network like Bitcoin, saying that the bitcoin community has already come up with standards that attempt to adhere to such as doing soft forks instead of hard forks wherever possible. They further explained that doing soft forks more often does not necessarily make things go faster and that both bundled and separate soft forks require testing to ensure that the changes interact appropriately. Finally, they noted that we should strive to one day get to a point where the bitcoin consensus isn't updating at all, although they acknowledged that this day is nowhere near and maybe we won't see it in their lifetime.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T02:38:34.339680+00:00