Author: Gregory Maxwell 2017-07-11 21:11:38
Published on: 2017-07-11T21:11:38+00:00
In a recent statement, Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell criticized grandly stated "top down" roadmaps in highly collaborative development. He argues that they are of minimal utility at best and actively misleading at worst. Maxwell suggests that Bitcoin should follow a similar model as the Linux kernel, which produces no roadmaps and instead relies on technical guidelines and independent contributors to decide on the project's direction. Maxwell believes that hard deadlines on functionality are effectively at odds with timely overall delivery and that it is important to remove or disable features if they fail during final testing. Ultimately, he thinks that Bitcoin should focus on creating timely and reliable releases rather than relying on grand top-down roadmaps. The consensus features delivery in software is not relevant until activation, which is a public election. The timing of discussing non-research topics is crucial and should be done when it's more forecastable.The discussion about SegWit was largely before the pull request, which was the wrong timing. Competitive pressure with other altcoins like Ethereum and Dash have made people use unrealistic dates for deployment. Signature aggregation and tx compaction are not appropriate to ask people to sign onto when they can't even review it.Collaborative innovation is hard to stick to a tight schedule, and roadmaps of prospective technology that no one has actual authority to make happen aren't productive. Major new things coming in Bitcoin Core 0.15 will be predictable and delivered for sure. Some of the items in the list appear to be more or less quoted out of the author's own blockstream-internal descriptions of things they've been working on in Bitcoin.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T03:18:47.353287+00:00