vnprc on Nostr: Regarding soft forks, the biggest blocker is that the community is fractured. No ...
Regarding soft forks, the biggest blocker is that the community is fractured. No consensus change will get through until we achieve unity or near unity of opinion on both the necessity and end-goal of a soft fork. I am coming to the opinion that the only way to get there is from a crisis. This is just how anarchy works.
It is unclear to me if we can ever go back to the era of experts pushing through non-essential upgrades. That door may have closed forever. Only time will tell.
So maybe the best thing we can do is keep iterating on proposals that address a specific problem and have them ready to go (or as close as we can manage) in the event that a crisis develops.
I see two developing crises:
- quantum computing
- scaling on-chain throughput
These are not independent concerns. Currently, the best quantum signatures are 100x larger than elliptic curve signatures. So "solving" this crisis will make our scaling problems exponentially worse.
There are a few early stage proposals for quantum resistant signature algorithms but the vast majority of the work remains to be done.
As for scaling, the existing covenant proposals haven't been shown to increase on-chain throughput, which is necessary for self-custody. The layered approach taken by lightning, ecash, ark, et al scales off-chain transaction throughput but at the end of the day users need to withdraw their sats on-chain to cold storage. This will be the bottleneck.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying scaling transaction throughput is not important. If we don't improve bitcoin's usability then we won't have scaling problems because it will stay niche forever.
But when it comes to consensus changes, self-custody is the thing we need to scale. This is how people protect themselves from debasement. If we don't address this problem then what are we even doing here? This was a great point raised by James OB and it has changed my thinking.
I will be applying this new filter when I consider soft fork proposals in the future: does it allow significantly more people to own an on-chain UTXO?
I've made some assumptions in this line of reasoning. It's always good to question your assumptions. There are the open questions in my mind:
Do existing covenants proposals increase on-chain throughput? I wasn't very rigorous in claiming that they don't. It is a loosely held belief.
Can bitcoiners protect themselves from debasement without owning a UTXO? Is a federated model like Liquid or Fedimint good enough? Is a trustless bridge to another chain possible? If it is possible, does it do anything to reduce fees?
It is unclear to me if we can ever go back to the era of experts pushing through non-essential upgrades. That door may have closed forever. Only time will tell.
So maybe the best thing we can do is keep iterating on proposals that address a specific problem and have them ready to go (or as close as we can manage) in the event that a crisis develops.
I see two developing crises:
- quantum computing
- scaling on-chain throughput
These are not independent concerns. Currently, the best quantum signatures are 100x larger than elliptic curve signatures. So "solving" this crisis will make our scaling problems exponentially worse.
There are a few early stage proposals for quantum resistant signature algorithms but the vast majority of the work remains to be done.
As for scaling, the existing covenant proposals haven't been shown to increase on-chain throughput, which is necessary for self-custody. The layered approach taken by lightning, ecash, ark, et al scales off-chain transaction throughput but at the end of the day users need to withdraw their sats on-chain to cold storage. This will be the bottleneck.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying scaling transaction throughput is not important. If we don't improve bitcoin's usability then we won't have scaling problems because it will stay niche forever.
But when it comes to consensus changes, self-custody is the thing we need to scale. This is how people protect themselves from debasement. If we don't address this problem then what are we even doing here? This was a great point raised by James OB and it has changed my thinking.
I will be applying this new filter when I consider soft fork proposals in the future: does it allow significantly more people to own an on-chain UTXO?
I've made some assumptions in this line of reasoning. It's always good to question your assumptions. There are the open questions in my mind:
Do existing covenants proposals increase on-chain throughput? I wasn't very rigorous in claiming that they don't. It is a loosely held belief.
Can bitcoiners protect themselves from debasement without owning a UTXO? Is a federated model like Liquid or Fedimint good enough? Is a trustless bridge to another chain possible? If it is possible, does it do anything to reduce fees?