Subject: [bitcoindev] [meta] moving conceptual discussion for policy changes

From: "'Matthew Zipkin' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2025 14:30:26 +0000

The comment brigade on the OPRETURN pull requests has gotten out of hand and I think we should consider adding a new process step for policy changes. The problem is that many users are not participating in the mailing list discussion and so the first time they hear about a policy change is on twitter, where it may feel like it is too late to do anything about it, and users feel disenfranchised. The result is a brigade of comments that are fast, poorly thought out, uninformed, and repetitive.

[https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/32359](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/32359#issuecomment-2839926151)

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/32381

meta: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/meta/discussions/18

It might still be possible to try this for OPRETURN policy or if not, I'd really like to try this the next time a policy change or other controversial code change comes up -- anything where "concept ACK" is not a sufficient technical pull request review comment:

What I think we need is a second step between the mailing list and the pull request. GitHub "discussions" are probably the best format for this, either in bitcoin-core/meta or bitcoin/bitcoin.

Taking a hint from Russ' comment in /meta#18, the discussion could be opened with position statements listing all the pro's and con's and most importantly, FAQs and busting myths like "bigger opreturns make it harder to run a full node".

The discussion should actually probably have a click bait title, so the link burns through twitter like wildfire. The whole point is to attract community members to a source of INFORMATION.

And then, after a weekend when the social media storm has rolled over, a nice quiet mature pull request review might be possible.

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