Bitcoin Amsterdam highlights the obstacles to reaching consensus on reform ideas
As seen in a heated panel discussion at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2023, Bitcoin Core developers have been grappling with Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) to address the protocol's pain points.
Long-time Bitcoin developers Paul Sztorc and Peter Todd brought this to the fore in Amsterdam, with the latter coming in as a strong critic of Sztorc's continued work on Drivechains.
Sztorc's LayerTwo Labs has been working on BIP-300 for almost six years, which supports the creation of Layer-2 sidechains that address many of the problems in the Bitcoin protocol without requiring a base layer change.
The ensuing debate, heated at times, highlighted the difficulty of reaching a consensus on BIPs that could improve the overall functionality of the Bitcoin protocol, as Todd spoke about Sztorc.
In an in-depth interview with Cointelegraph at the conference, Jameson Loup, co-founder and chief technology officer of Bitcoin (BTC) escrow institution Casa, weighed in on the issue and said the pace of updates and protocol changes has been slow rather than slow. He loved it.
That has changed somewhat in recent weeks with the emergence of new projects like BitVM and SpiderChain, according to Loup, which leads him to believe that two planned soft forks could be important for the future of the protocol.
“Overall, I think Bitcoin needs to implement functionality that enhances its ability to be a cryptographic storage that you can call it. Bitcoin needs to enable functionality that enhances the capabilities of secondary layers.”
Lopp added that some senior experts have argued in the past that any potential “hardcore ossification” would have stifled the innovations that have led to solutions like the Lightning Network, which have helped scale the Bitcoin network.
Lightning cannot be realized without OP_CLTV. Maybe it was possible, but really tricky without SegWit. And without OP_CSV, there can't be lightning channels that last indefinitely.
The loop was referring to CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY (OP_CSV) and CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY (OP_CLTV) – two BIPs performed to optimize payment channels as soft forks. OP_CLTV was written by Todd and defines a Bitcoin operation code that allows the output of a transaction to be unexpendable until a specified time in the future.
Related: Bitcoin Amsterdam: Focus on BTC basics, says Edward Snowden
Lopp added that while the Bitcoin protocol may be permanent due to a lack of consensus on basic layer-by-layer improvements, developers will continue to build in ways that don't require permissions:
If it is not possible to implement a well-implemented solution at the base layer of the underlying protocol, generally speaking, the solution that we end up seeing is packaged in many cases.
The Casa exec believes that if Bitcoin doesn't continue to scale, users will inevitably turn to storing and using BTC through “a handful of Bitcoin banks, aka custodians and exchanges,” which will result in significant trade.
“Then it's iOS, right? I don't think that's the future any of us want to see.
As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Bitcoin proponents and analysts at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2023 highlighted the importance of the cryptocurrency's value proposition and hard money characteristics amid a growing bear market.
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