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

From: Brandon Black <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2025 11:09:24 -0700

Hi Sjors,

On 2025-06-10 (Tue) at 18:56:54 +0200, Sjors Provoost wrote:
> From both your and Andrew's mail we can distill a relevant factor: pretty much everyone who is excited about (feature) soft forks is not working on Bitcoin Core.
> 
> A few, such as yourself and Jeremy, were in the past but stopped doing so.
> 
> Although trying to persuade more people inside the project to review and further develop these proposals is useful - methods and tone tbd - also consider the opposite: convince more people who want these changes to start contributing to Bitcoin Core.

[...]

> 1. It takes years to ramp up. The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago. But it's been six years and multiple developers could have been ramped up by now. To be fair, grant budgets were pretty tight until only two years ago.[1]

You might notice that there's a strong correlation of new developers
interested in potentially making improvements to bitcoin's consensus
rules _not_ investing the years to ramp up on the project starting about
the same time that the CTV and APO proposals were abandoned.

This open letter reflects the reality that if none of the central
members of a project are working in the direction that an enthusiastic
outsider is interested in pursuing it is approximately impossible for
that outsider to ramp up on the project and reasonably hope to achieve
their goals.

I have not discussed this with other signatories to the letter, but I
suspect that a commitment to mentor and support developers working on
consensus improvements from the broader bitcoin core project would also
constitute a satisfactory response.

While we the signatories believe that CTV+CSFS is a positive direction
for consensus improvements on bitcoin, I don't think any of us would say
that it is the only possible positive consensus improvement. The primary
thrust of this letter is that consensus improvements should be
prioritized alongside other work on bitcoin core. In an environment
where consensus improvements were given equal billing to relay, p2p,
build system, refactoring and other current project priorities this
letter would never have been authored, signed, nor published.

Fond regards,

--Brandon

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