I’ve been in two minds on whether to completely move on to other topics or to
formulate some thoughts on the recent attempt to activate a contentious soft
fork. In the interests of those of us who have wasted days/weeks/months of our
time on this (with no personal upside) and who don’t want to repeat this
exercise again I thought I should at least raise the issue for discussion of
what should be done differently if this is tried again in future.
This could be Jeremy with OP_CTV at a later point (assuming it is still
contentious) or anyone who wants to pick up a single opcode that is not yet
activated on Bitcoin and try to get miners to signal for it bypassing technical
concerns from many developers, bypassing Bitcoin Core and bypassing users.
Maybe the whole thing worked as designed. Some users identified what was going
on, well known Bitcoin educators such as Andreas Antonopoulos, Jimmy Song etc
brought additional attention to the dangers, a URSF movement started to gain
momentum and those attempting a contentious soft fork activation backed off.
(Disappointingly Bitcoin Optech didn't cover my previous posts to this mailing
list [1], [2], [3] highlighting the dangers many months ago or recent posts.
Normally Optech is very high signal.)
Alternatively this was the first time a contentious soft fork activation was
attempted, we were all woefully unprepared for it and none of us knew what we
were doing.
I’m unsure on the above. I’d be interested to hear thoughts. What I am sure of
is that it is totally unacceptable for one individual to bring the entire
Bitcoin network to the brink of a chain split. There has to be a personal cost
to that individual dissuading them from trying it again otherwise they’re
motivated to try it again every week/month. Perhaps the personal cost that the
community is now prepared if that individual tries it again is sufficient. I’m
not sure. Obviously Bitcoin is a permissionless network, Bitcoin Core and other
open source projects are easily forked and no authority (I’m certainly no
authority) can stop things like this happening again.
I’ll follow the responses if people have thoughts (I won't be responding to the
instigators of this contentious soft fork activation attempt) but other than
that I’d like to move on to other things than contentious soft fork
activations. Thanks to those who have expressed concerns publicly (too many to
name, Bob McElrath was often wording arguments better than I could) and who
were willing to engage with the URSF conversation. If an individual can go
directly to miners to get soft forks activated bypassing technical concerns
from many developers, bypassing Bitcoin Core and bypassing users Bitcoin is
fundamentally broken. The reason I still have hope that it isn't is that during
a period of general apathy some people were willing to stand up and actively
resist it.
[1]:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-October/019535.html
[2]:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-January/019728.html
[3]:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-April/020235.html
--
Michael Folkson
Email: michaelfolkson at [protonmail.com](http://protonmail.com/)
Keybase: michaelfolkson
PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3
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