Another in a recent series of really excellent podcasts (e.g., this and this are examples of thought-provoking recent ones), this is my favorite take so far on the ossification issue. Vijay is a legend, and as usual is thoughtful and articulate.
The real value for me, though, came from the other guy, Brandon Black, who I'd never heard of before. A key part of his take was: the most crucial components of btc's value is that it's verifiable and uncensorable, and for that to be true it has to be maximally decentralized, not just in the obvious way of people being able to run nodes, but wrt the second-order influences that would allow (or prevent) people from having sovereign control over their own funds. The features afforded by the base layer will powerfully contribute to that; and so we need to concern ourselves with the ends, not just the means.
Many such aspects of this issue were surfaced, all well-reasoned, thoughtful, subtle. Should be an aspirational model for btc discussion.
I don't get how upgrades would affect decentralisation and verification, those are base aspects along with the hard cap, who is going to upgrade to a software that cooks that and forks the chain? We've already seen what happns to forks
A lot of the ossification crowd give me the vibe that the only objection really is the hit the fiat price
Now I am not for upgrade every few months, that's for L2s to do, but Bitcoin will need updates, there's only so much you can abstract to other layers
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I think the point is that btc is a social system instantiated through technical means; the implication is that upgrades that support decentralization through their emergent expression are to be supported; those that reduce it -- or inaction that results in it being reduced -- are not.
This is a more challenging way to look at it and requires understanding lots of things more deeply, which is hard.
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22 sats \ 1 reply \ @freetx 15 Jun
Define "Update".
That is the entirety of the argument. Are you talking about bug fixes? Are you talking about new features?
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define bug then? Is bug something that impairs the system from achieving an outcome? if so isn't something that impairs the ability to scale a bug?
lol
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Wonderful take - I think a measured, molasses approach is important.
The whole taproot thing proved to many of us that sometimes making a change can and will lead to unintended consequences (ordinals).
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I think you could make that argument for unintended consequences the other way too, if ossification happened earlier and we didn't get segwit, then there'd be no LN and we'd have missed out on so much value creation for the wider network like we see today, none of us can really predict what the market will push to the top, some good some bad, but the bad stuff usually cooks itself with time as it's economically unviable
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The podcast makes a similar point -- the bad question is "ossification or not"; the good question is "how will this change, or not making this change, affect the system as it comes to be expressed in the world, at this time?"
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Yip, with you there, hindsight is a bitch, everyone can seem smart looking back, but when we have to make decisions based on what we know today, the same way others did when they pushed for taproot or segwit
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Brandon Black is Readen Code on Twitter.
Really a breath of fresh air to the space and immensely insightful
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Good debate. Bitcoin power 💪
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stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.