Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Stumbling into a contentious soft fork activation attempt

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2022 18:41:02 -0500

On Tue, Jan 18, 2022 at 02:57:30AM +0100, Prayank wrote:
> Hi Peter,
> 
> > that current lacks compelling use-cases clearly beneficial to all users
> 
> All the use cases shared in below links look compelling enough to me and we can do anything that a programmer could think of using such restrictions:
> 
>  https://utxos.org/uses/
> 
> https://rubin.io/archive/

Again, what I said was "compelling use-cases _clearly_ beneficial to _all_
users", not just a small subset. I neither think the use-cases in those links
are clearly compelling in the current form, and they of course, don't benefit
all users. Indeed, the Drivechains use-case arguably *harms* all users, as
Drivechains is arguably harmful to the security of Bitcoin as a whole.
Similarly, the various new uses for on-chain transactions mentioned as a
use-case arguably harms all existing users by competing for scarce blockchain
space - note how ETH has quite high on chain fees for basic transactions,
because there are so many use-cases where the per-tx value can afford much
higher fees. That kind of expansion of use-case also arguably harms Bitcoin as
a whole by providing more fuel for a future contentious blocksize debate.

Bitcoin is an almost $1 trillion dollar system. We have to very carefully weigh
the benefits of making core consensus changes to that system against the risks.
Both for each proposal in isolation, as well as the precedent making that
change sets.

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