Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Updating the Scaling Roadmap [Update]

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2017 17:50:38 -0400

On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 02:49:22PM -0400, Alex Morcos via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> "it was ACKed by everyone else that I heard from"  - I don't think you
> should read into that much.
> 
> I felt like this whole conversation was putting the cart before the horse.
> You might very well have some good ideas in your roadmap update, to tell
> you the truth, I didn't even read it.
> But I don't think we should be taking relatively new/untested ideas such as
> Drivechain and sticking them on a roadmap.  There is a tendency in this
> community to hear about the latest and greatest idea and immediately fixate
> on it as our salvation. I'm very happy that you are doing this work and
> that others are researching a wide variety of ideas.  But please, lets be
> conservative and flexible with how we evolve Bitcoin.  We don't even know
> if or when we'll get segwit yet.

Agreed!

A closely related example is my own Treechains work, which got a bunch of
excitement when I first published the idea. But would I have wanted it on a
roadmap? Hell no: sure enough, as it got more peer review others (and myself!)
found that it was going to be a harder than it initially looked to actually get
into production.

Drivechains is definitely in that situation right now.

Also don't forget that proper security peer review takes a *lot* of work. I
myself have a todo list item to respond to Paul's post on Drivechains, but I
need to spend a few days to do that and just haven't had the time (not to
mention that no-one is paying me to do general Bitcoin dev work right now).

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org