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

From: Andrew Poelstra <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2025 13:23:06 +0000

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.

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.

> 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!

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.)

-- 
Andrew Poelstra
Director, Blockstream Research
Email: apoelstra at wpsoftware.net
Web:   https://www.wpsoftware.net/andrew

The sun is always shining in space
    -Justin Lewis-Webster

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