Author: Christian Decker 2013-10-24 11:11:05
Published on: 2013-10-24T11:11:05+00:00
In the context, Christian Decker discussed the historical background of how the protocol specification came to be in the first place. He started an attempt over three years ago to document the network protocol by reverse engineering it from the Satoshi client. His goal was to enable other engineers to create alternative clients and move away from the client-monoculture that is still predominant today. Although the protocol description is far more complete than it was back when they started, he doesn't feel comfortable giving it the name specification. Christian believes that a client monoculture is bad for the system as a whole because a single bug might bring down the whole network. Giving people the necessary tools to implement new clients brings stability. He thinks that having a specification allows an application-independent review of the protocol to identify possible improvements and bugs. So much so that they pushed a long time ago to separate protocol version from the client version. Christian Decker would love to see the protocol specification becoming an official part of the Bitcoin GitHub repository, which would ideally be maintained alongside the Satoshi client to keep it up to date. In response, Martin Sustrik suggested that extensive documentation of the source code may be some kind of middle ground to avoid misunderstandings regarding the reference implementation source code.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T17:59:56.026959+00:00