Subject: [bitcoin-dev] Yesterday's Taproot activation meeting on IRC

From: Michael Folkson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2021 14:24:59 +0000

Yesterday (February 2nd) we held a relatively unstructured meeting on
Taproot activation on IRC which was open to all.

The conversation log is here:
http://gnusha.org/taproot-activation/2021-02-02.log

The meeting was previously announced here:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-January/018370.html

I will summarize what was discussed as best I can. Please revert to the
conversation log if you have the time as any summary is going to be
imperfect. Any errors or biases are my own and corrections will be
gratefully accepted.

I’ll start with Rusty Russell’s takeaways (many thanks to our Asia Pacific
representatives for joining in the middle of the night by the way) on
Mastodon:

1. Unanimous support for BIP 8. RIP BIP 9.

2. Overwhelming consensus that 1 year is the correct timeout value (it’s
actually defined in blocks, so 26x2016 or maybe 87600).

3. Majority consensus for lockinontimeout false, though Luke Dashjr
strongly opposed.

4. No decision I could see on start time, but 2 months was done for SegWit
and that didn’t seem too objectionable.

https://bitcoinhackers.org/@rusty/105664386728806153

I personally think this is a solid summary though I do want to point out it
wasn’t only Luke that opposed lockinontimeout=false. There were other
individuals who also opposed lockinontimeout=false but at least from my
reading that was the minority opinion. Luke concluded there wasn’t clear
consensus on it and that even if lockinontimeout=false was eventually
chosen as a Bitcoin Core default he would be running lockinontimeout=true
on his node.

In terms of the PRs, the following BIP 8 PRs were merged following the
meeting.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1020

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1021

The latter was merged due to an observation from Jonas Nick in the PR
comments and during the meeting that without it nodes could end up on the
wrong chain in a scenario where they run lockinontimeout=true with most
nodes running lockinontimeout=false.

The Bitcoin Core PR #19573 requires additional work from its author and
further review before it can be considered for merging.

I do want to thank the large number of participants for engaging in the
discussion in the spirit of wanting to make progress on Taproot activation
and for gracefully allowing me to interrupt them and keep the discussion on
topic. The vast majority of the time this level of bluntness (and pushing
away slightly off topic questions) is not desired or required in Bitcoin
technical meetings. I hope those who were interrupted during this meeting
will return and ask their questions now a meeting of that sheer size is
over.

We are in the process of attempting to organize a follow up more closely
following the format of John Newbery’s Bitcoin Core PR review club which
will be lower level, technical and focused on the Bitcoin Core PR #19573.
The Bitcoin Core PR review club is also open to all but given its more
technical nature it shouldn’t present the same challenges as yesterday’s
meeting.

Thanks to Alejandro De La Torre for providing an update on his website (
taprootactivation.com) following the meeting. Chun Wang (co-founder of
F2Pool, ~ 16 percent of global hash rate) has decided to support BIP
8(false,1 year).

-- 
Michael Folkson
Email: [email-masked]
Keybase: michaelfolkson
PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3