A little less than a year ago, I Announced on Twitter Bitcoin script project ideas. It is no exaggeration to say that it was well received. Bitcoiners were desperate for something they could cling to in the middle of the bear. There was a glimmer of hope and I wanted to expand on it and rally the industry around the new technology story. Unfortunately, life had other plans and long story short, I quickly realized that I had bitten off more than I could chew at the time.
The Bitcoin script project never saw the light of day. At best, it was a short-lived social awareness campaign. That generated some ideas and moved the conversation forward. At least, maybe that’s why I have the privilege of working on this column today. I bring this up because my experience is no different from that of hundreds of individuals who have tried to make their mark on Bitcoin. It is a humbling and thankless event. Wounded egos are common. There are many people in this field who have put in far more blood, sweat, and tears than I have.
But sometimes the stars align and our collective actions begin to exceed our individual interests. As you know, Bitcoin moves at its own rhythm. If you try to pick up the pace, it will ruin the whole dance. This synchronization process requires a lot of patience.
Just when the walls seemed to be closing in last week, the dance company finally got going. And it was beautiful. Optimism returned after a long hiatus, and fear, uncertainty, and doubt finally dispelled. The upcoming opportunity has galvanized the developer community to undertake perhaps its most ambitious work yet.
Make scripts great again
As I entered the auditorium of the Palmer Events Center in Austin on Wednesday morning, it was hard to ignore the flashbacks to days gone by.
A similar eerie event occurred in Montreal, Canada in 2015 and set the tone for the next decade. Bitcoin scaling A critical juncture in the project’s history was reached just as the community was struggling to define its vision for the future. This event was an introduction to some of the then young and nascent figures in the industry. The entire metaphorical brain of Bitcoin is under his one roof. It’s scary in hindsight.
That’s off topic, but Bitcoin++ It was a similar atmosphere last week. You could tell right away that there was a special energy in the building and the crowd was great as well. A stark contrast to the average conference roadshow and online antics we’re used to.
No billboards, no 280 character rants. And most importantly, there are no sales pitches either.
At the start of the conference, it was impossible to ignore the momentum behind the OP_CAT proposal. Its most ardent supporters were probably preparing this event to be its dedication. A rough consensus emerged, and even those who had initially dismissed it came to agree with the idea.
As fate would have it, at least one person had other plans, and within the first few minutes of his presentation, the impact was felt by everyone in attendance.
”Great Script Restoration Projectis Blockstream developer Rusty Russell’s attempt to flip the proverbial script on everyone. This is a journey to ponder the “why” behind the confusion of scripts and proposed contracts that have been flying around lately. What are we trying to achieve?
Why not modify the Bitcoin script and restore it to its former glory?
For context, a significant portion of Bitcoin’s scripting capabilities were abruptly removed in 2010 when certain features were found to be at risk for resource exhaustion attacks (DDoS). Rather than addressing the root problem, Satoshi cut into everything he thought could be affected, and the messy, hacky byproduct is what we’re left with today. Masu. A lot of our conversations so far have been about putting Band-Aids here and there on the script and restoring some functionality. This inevitably led us into an impasse of horse trading and bike storage.
Restoration projects suggest flipping this approach on its head and taking the appropriate engineering steps to get there. If we agree on a destination, we should take advantage of this opportunity to change Bitcoin for the better. Political and social bigots and bigots should be damned. This latter point cannot be overstated. Intentionally or not, Rusty’s presentation feels like a call for developers to break free from dogma and embrace science anew.
We’ve found that the best way to engage developers is to bombard them with data, benchmarks, and measurements. I’ll leave it to more technical people to explain the details of his framework, but it’s worth pointing out why it has proven to be so effective. Rusty allows you to integrate them all under the same umbrella by providing a model that takes into account the cost of each related change. This is a major departure from the existing framework, which pitted all proposals against each other. Instead, we work together to use thoughtful engineering to fix what was previously considered abandoned and broken.
trust the process
To be clear, the “Screenplay Restoration Project” hardly qualifies as a proposal yet. This is just a loose collection of ideas and very early suggestions on how to approach them. The reason it’s gotten so much attention in such a short period of time is because it’s an opportunity to do something different. To finish Satoshi’s work.
For the first time in a long time, some rough outlines of agreement are taking shape. It may not be about the proposal, but at least it’s about the process. That’s progress.
“Let’s be engineers. Let’s be objective and have a rational discussion on this matter. Yes, we need to convince the rest of the world, but let’s all pull in the same direction.” “It’s much easier.” christian decker
