Author: Michael Folkson 2022-09-17 15:53:48
Published on: 2022-09-17T15:53:48+00:00
The lack of community consensus in a permissionless and open-source community is problematic, as there is no process that can stop or direct those who don't care about it. Despite this issue, the technical community understands that Bitcoin still has untapped potential that requires long-term changes.The idea of signet having soft fork proposals enabled on it is appealing, especially if it needs more code to be moved out of the Core repo. Protocols built on signet and Liquid/sidechains can help convince the community to take the chain split risk for an upgrade. Although Taproot was a slog to get community consensus on, the majority thinks it was worth the effort.While the Great Consensus Cleanup project is useful, Matt Corallo believes that lack of champions is the main issue in progressing soft-fork proposals. He disagrees with the notion that testing frameworks are a significant part of the problem. For instance, the great consensus cleanup would have made more progress over the past 3.5 years if there had been a champion for it.Steps one through three involve coming up with an idea, socializing it within the technical community, and proposing the concrete idea with a well-defined strawman. If someone thinks it's a good enough idea, they must step up and champion it themselves; otherwise, no one will do it for them.CTV has gone through steps one to three, but there is only one author on the list, making it difficult to argue that step three has been completed. Rusty's proposal has received positive feedback, but being the champion for a soft-fork is a full-time job that requires months of attention. There needs to be more exploration, development, and research into covenants, and fostering a community with high standards and open to new ideas while avoiding chain split fights is essential. Antoine's covenant R&D effort seems promising, and hopefully, more people engage with it.The Bitcoin Core developer, Matt Corallo, recently posted a message on the bitcoin-dev mailing list to encourage contributions towards Bitcoin's upcoming Taproot upgrade. He mentioned that there are many people who would be happy to mentor anyone who wants to contribute towards this development.Taproot is a proposed upgrade to Bitcoin's scripting language which is expected to improve privacy, scalability and security. It is designed to make multi-signature transactions more efficient and reduce their cost. The upgrade has been under discussion for several years, with the community working on its implementation.Corallo also referred to Segwit, an earlier upgrade that was implemented in 2017. Segwit was designed to address the problem of transaction malleability and increase block size by separating signature data from transaction data. With Segwit, the transaction capacity of Bitcoin increased as more transactions could be included in a single block.The message highlights the importance of community involvement in the development of Bitcoin. The open-source nature of Bitcoin allows anyone to contribute towards its development, and the success of the cryptocurrency depends on the participation of its users. By encouraging contributions towards Taproot, Corallo hopes to attract more developers who can help improve Bitcoin's functionality and make it more accessible to the general public.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T00:17:18.634457+00:00