Bitcoin Amsterdam highlights hurdles for consensus over improvement proposals
Bitcoin core developers have long been at odds over Bitcoin improvement proposals (BIPs) to address the pain points of the protocol, as was apparent in a heated panel discussion during Bitcoin Amsterdam 2023.
Long-time Bitcoin developers Paul Sztorc and Peter Todd brought this to the fore in Amsterdam, with the latter coming across as highly critical of Sztorc’s work in the ongoing development of Drivechains.
Sztorc’s LayerTwo Labs has been working on BIP-300 for nearly six years, which advocates for the creation of layer-2 sidechains that have the potential to address several problems without requiring base layer changes to the Bitcoin protocol.
The ensuing debate, which was at times heated, with Todd talking over Sztorc, highlighted the difficulty in reaching a consensus over BIPs that could potentially improve the overall functionality of the Bitcoin protocol.
Jameson Lopp, co-founder and chief technology officer of Bitcoin (BTC) custody firm Casa, weighed in on the issue during an in-depth interview with Cointelegraph at the conference, saying that the velocity of improvements and protocol changes has slowed down more than he would have liked.
That has changed somewhat in recent weeks with the emergence of new projects like BitVM and SpiderChain, as Lopp explains, which leads him to believe that a couple of proposed soft forks may well be beneficial to the future of the protocol:
Lopp adds that any potential “hardcore ossification” that some maximalists have argued for in the past would have stifled innovation that led to the creation of solutions like the Lightning Network that has helped the Bitcoin network scale to better process transactions.
Lopp was referencing CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY (OP_CSV) and CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY
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