Updating the Scaling Roadmap [Update]

Summary:

In July 2017, Paul Sztorc proposed updating the Core Scalability Roadmap. The older statement of Dec 2015 endorsed a belief that "the community is ready to deliver on its shared vision that addresses the needs of the system while upholding its values". However, the shared vision has grown sharper over the last 18 months. According to Paul, it's necessary to revise it: remove what has been accomplished, introduce new innovations and approaches, and update deadlines and projections. He emphasized concrete numbers, and concrete dates.The roadmap helped synchronize the entire Bitcoin community, helping to bring finality to the conversations of that time, and get everyone back to work. Paul believes that the scaling conversation itself has a fatal O(n^2) scaling problem. The roadmap solved these problems by being constant in size, and subjecting itself to publication, endorsement, criticism, and so forth. Despite the nuance and complexity of each individual opinion, it was at least globally known that X participants endorsed Y set of claims. Unfortunately, the Dec 2015 roadmap is now 19 months old -- it is quite obsolete, and replacing it is long overdue.The new roadmap includes technologies which either increase Bitcoin's maximum tps rate ("capacity"), or which make it easier to process a higher volume of transactions ("scalability"). First, over the past 18 months, the technical community has completed a number of items on the Dec 2015 roadmap. Second, Segregated Witness (BIP 141), which reorganizes data in blocks to handle signatures separately, has been completed and awaits activation. Third, the Lightning Network, which allows users to transact without broadcasting to the network, is complete and awaits the activation of SegWit. Fourth, Transaction Compression observes that Bitcoin transaction serialization is not optimized for storage or network communication. Fifth, Schnorr Signature Aggregation, which shrinks transactions by allowing many transactions to have a single shared signature, has been implemented in draft form in libsecp256k1 and will likely be ready by Q4 of 2016. Sixth, Drivechain which allows bitcoins to be temporarily offloaded to 'alternative' blockchain networks is currently under peer review and may be usable by the end of 2017.The capacity improvements outlined above may not be sufficient. If so, it may be necessary to use a hard fork to increase the blocksize by a moderate amount. Such an increase should take advantage of the existing research on hard forks, which is substantial. Finally, the document was put on GitHub for comments and expressions of interest.In February 2017, a draft of an updated roadmap for Bitcoin was shared on the bitcoin-dev mailing list. The author of the draft, Paul, solicited feedback from the community on the proposed changes. He asked if the update would be helpful and requested specific edits, particularly related to Drivechain thoughts and Hard Fork thoughts. A Google Doc link was provided for those interested in reviewing the draft. The purpose of this communication was to gather input and improve the roadmap for Bitcoin's future development. However, without interest from the maintainers of bitcoincore.org, the document will probably be unable to gain traction.

Updated on: 2023-06-12T03:42:30.209229+00:00