Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] CTV + CSFS: a letter

From: Matt Corallo <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2025 13:17:07 -0400

On 6/10/25 9:23 AM, Andrew Poelstra wrote:
> Le Mon, Jun 09, 2025 at 04:08:21PM -1000, David A. Harding a écrit :
>>
>> Why do you think nobody in Core wants to engage at all with consensus
>> changes (or, at least, specifically the proposals for CTV & CSFS)?
>>
> 
> Because everybody actively working on Core has a project that, while
> interesting and useful, does not affect users or the network in any
> visible way. Over the years there has been a ton of work refactoring
> the project into multiple libraries, rewriting the logic behind the
> RPC interface and help text, upgrading to new C++ versions, etc.,
> and yet if you want to mine from your local node on a local miner
> today you need to run Sjors' personal fork of the project plus two
> other daemons.
> 
> I'm being a bit unfair here -- over the same period there has been a
> ton of critical infrastructure work on transaction relay, descriptor
> wallets and mempool unification. Some things, like TRUC, even change
> relay behavior on the network. But these are still things that no
> ordinary user could articulate well enough to complain about.
> 
> This is understandable -- I also don't want to deal with the kind of
> BS where making simple obvious mempool optimizations leads to Twitter
> brigading and funded FUD campaigns. (Let alone something like the segwit
> FUD campaign which was much larger and more professional.) And of
> course, consensus changes requires large-scale public engagement; these
> changes are not "luck of the draw" "hope your change doesn't get linked
> on twitter" kinda things.
> 
> But the result, when everybody feels this way, is a lack of engagement
> from the project as a whole.

I don't think this is a fair characterization in the slightest. Yes, many people who contribute to 
Bitcoin Core are not currently spending their time working on consensus changes, but that doesn't 
mean they didn't pick to work on something that they think is the highest ROI on their time for the 
bitcoin network as a whole.

The relay changes you mention but sweep under the rug are a critical improvement to the security 
model and usability of lightning, a widely-deployed and now highly utilized critical piece of 
bitcoin (Cash App's public numbers from the Vegas conference indicate its about 25% of their 
withdraw volume by count!).

While many of the letter signatories may think that that isn't the right use of time, or the best 
way to improve Bitcoin, I don't think its a fair conclusion to claim that they're somehow wrong, 
rather than simply of a different opinion.

Its also probably fair that many developers don't really *want* to work on consensus changes because 
of the risk of Drama, but that's clearly not universal, given Antoine's work to pick up and tweak 
the Great Consensus Cleanup. Clearly some Bitcoin Core contributors think that working on consensus 
changes is the best use of their time, just not the ones that the letter signatories happen to think 
are the important ones.

Of course sign-on letters do little to reduce the impact of Drama, only contribute to it :(

> Complicating matters is the fact that it's quite hard to contribute
> things to Bitcoin Core -- it is hard to get reviews, when you can get
> them they're slow, you need to spend months or years rebasing over the
> codebase churn, etc. These problems are well-known. So it's hard to
> onboard new people who want to push on more-visible things.
> 
>> The usual purpose of an open letter is to generate public pressure against
>> the target (otherwise, if you didn't want to generate public pressure, you
>> would send a private letter).
> 
> There isn't really any place to send a "private" letter. For most
> open-source projects I could just file a discussion on their Github
> repo, which would be unnoticed and unread by anyone else. Core does not
> have that privilege.
> 
> There are in-person meetups a few times a year but for (happy) family
> reasons I've been unable to attend, and won't be able to for the next
> few years at least.
> 
> And of course I could email specific developers personally, but there
> are no individuals that it makes sense to target, because this isn't an
> individual problem. It's an incentive problem.

If its an incentive problem, though, sending a vaguely-threatening letter giving a six-month 
ultimatum is all the more likely to drive the incentives in the wrong direction, not the right one. 
Asking individuals why they, personally, are not currently working towards script expansion changes 
is probably much more illuminating, or asking "what would it take to convince you to work on these 
kinds of changes".

In my experience, there is interest from various Bitcoin Core contributors to spend time on this, 
but four-year projects like mempool policy have some way to go towards their conclusion and people 
like to see things through :).

The fact that several companies are working to build and deploy Ark-based payment systems is also a 
large part of that - having a concrete application where the developers see substantial gains (which 
can be independently evaluated, at least once things are up and running, which as I understand it 
will be soon) with specific consensus changes is a strong motivator. Previous attempts at getting 
CTV activated largely (in my experience) failed to get people excited because the demonstrated 
use-cases for CTV by itself did not feel super compelling.

>> Does that mean that you feel the lack of
>> engagement is a result of a previous lack of pressure?  I have to admit that
>> runs counter to my own sense---I thought there was already significant
>> social pressure on Bitcoin Core contributors to work on CTV (and now CSFS);
>> I wouldn't expect more pressure to achieve new results; rather, I'd expect
>> more pressure to create more frustration on all sides.
>>
> 
> I think that logistically there isn't any non-public medium that would
> work. Maybe solving this would also solve the incentive problems around
> making big changes!

Conferences, individual emails, signal messages are all options that exist? I'm kinda confused by 
this comment, honestly. Yea, there's no great way to "address all of Bitcoin Core" at once, but that 
doesn't mean most of the most prolific contributors don't go to regular conferences, meetups, and 
aren't responsive to personal messages (at least in some cases).

I imagine, maybe wrongly, but I imagine that nearly every substantial Bitcoin Core contributor is at 
least two conferences a year, and they're usually speakers so their names are on the websites of the 
conferences.

> I spent a while deliberating about whether signing onto an open letter
> would just cause flamewars and "more pressure" -- especially since I'm
> probably closer to Core development than any of the other signers, and
> because its specific technical demand (CTV + CSFS) is not even something
> I feel strongly about.
> 
> My goal was to start exactly this discussion, by talking about the role
> Core plays in this ecosystem and pointing to (in my view) the incentive
> problems that are getting in the way of that role.
> 
>> Alternatively, if you feel like the lack of engagement is a result of some
>> other condition, I would be curious to learn of that condition and learn why
>> you thought an open letter (with what comes across as an ultimatum) would
>> help address it.
>>
> 
> I apologize if it comes off as an ultimatum -- it has a timeline, but
> one for a "respectful ask" for "review and integration" and no specified
> consquences (I'm not even sure what consequences would look like ...
> perhaps a fork of Core? I can say that I personally would never go along
> with a consensus-changing fork of Core, barring some extreme event like
> outright abandonment of the project.)

Fair enough. There are apparently differing views by other letter-signers on the meaning of the "six 
month" timeline :).

Matt

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