Subject: [bitcoin-dev] Yesterday's Taproot activation meeting on lockinontimeout (LOT)

From: Michael Folkson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2021 12:51:41 +0000

Yesterday (February 16th) we held a second meeting on Taproot
activation on IRC which again was open to all. Despite what appeared
to be majority support for LOT=false over LOT=true in the first
meeting I (and others) thought the arguments had not been explored in
depth and that we should have a follow up meeting almost entirely
focused on whether LOT (lockinontimeout) should be set to true or
false.

The meeting was announced here:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-February/018380.html

In that mailing list post I outlined the arguments for LOT=true (T1 to
T6) and arguments for LOT=false (F1 to F6) in their strongest form I
could. David Harding responded with an additional argument for
LOT=false (F7) here:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-February/018415.html

These meetings are very challenging given they are open to all, you
don’t know who will attend and you don’t know most people’s views in
advance. I tried to give time for both the LOT=true arguments and the
LOT=false arguments to be discussed as I knew there was support for
both. We only tried evaluating which had more support and which had
more strong opposition towards the end of the meeting.

The conversation log is here:
http://gnusha.org/taproot-activation/2021-02-16.log

(If you are so inclined you can watch a video of the meeting here.
Thanks to the YouTube account “Bitcoin” for setting up the livestream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpl5q1ovMLM)

A summary of the meeting was provided by Luke Dashjr on Mastodon here:
https://bitcoinhackers.org/@lukedashjr/105742918779234566

Today's #Bitcoin #Taproot meeting was IMO largely unproductive, but we
did manage to come to consensus on everything but LockinOnTimeout.

Activation height range: 693504-745920

MASF threshold: 1815/2016 blocks (90%)

Keep in mind only ~100 people showed for the meetings, hardly
representative of the entire community.

So, these details remain JUST a proposal for now.

It seems inevitable that there won't be consensus on LOT.

Everyone will have to choose for himself. :/

Personally I agree with most of this. I agree that there wasn’t
overwhelming consensus for either LOT=true or LOT=false. However, from
my perspective there was clearly more strong opposition (what would
usually be deemed a NACK in Bitcoin Core review terminology) from
Bitcoin Core contributors, Lightning developers and other community
members against LOT=true than there was for LOT=false. Andrew Chow
tried to summarize views from the meeting in this analysis:
https://gist.github.com/achow101/3e179501290abb7049de198d46894c7c

I am also aware of other current and previous Bitcoin Core
contributors and Lightning developers who didn’t attend the meeting in
person who are opposed to LOT=true. I don’t want to put them in the
spotlight for no reason but if you go through the conversation logs of
not only the meeting but the weeks of discussion prior to this meeting
you will see their views evaluated on the ##taproot-activation
channel. In addition, on taprootactivation.com some mining pools
expressed a preference for lot=false though I don’t know how strong
that preference was.

I am only one voice but it is my current assessment that if we are to
attempt to finalize Taproot activation parameters and propose them to
the community at this time our only option is to propose LOT=false.
Any further delay appears to me counterproductive in our collective
aim to get the Taproot soft fork activated as early as possible.

Obviously others are free to disagree with that assessment and
continue discussions but personally I will be attempting to avoid
those discussions unless prominent new information comes to light or
various specific individuals change their minds.

Next week we are planning a code review of the Bitcoin Core PR #19573
which was initially delayed because of this LOT discussion. As I’ve
said previously that will be loosely following the format of the
Bitcoin Core PR review club and will be lower level and more
technical. That is planned for Tuesday February 23rd at 19:00 UTC on
the IRC channel ##taproot-activation.

Thanks to the meeting participants (and those who joined the
discussion on the channel prior and post the meeting) for engaging
productively and in good faith.

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