For reference, here are my main thoughts on the current Bitcoin softfork ideas/dramas to those who care.
For context with regards to wherever it might matter, I have a 12-year background as an engine...
Also, in my humour opinion, even though Bitcoiner software engineers notionally know Bitcoin doesn’t behave the same as any other piece of software, there’s a bias or inclination to act as if it does:
- Living software changes and gets new features, if it doesn’t it’s dead or dying and that’s bad. For Bitcoin, this doesn’t hold. (Change in a functional sense, not ensuring it continues to run, which is maintenance)
- it’s a piece of FOSS so it is and only is a software engineering product. Change proposals are viewed as a software eng and developer agreement issue, ignoring the wider commercial and economic interest and properties of Bitcoin
- it doesn’t matter if we add a feature not everyone wants to use, it doesn’t really affect them if they don’t use it. Again not true of Bitcoin, we’re hyper-paranoid about unintended side-effects, incentive changes (again econ/human action not a software problem!) and increased attack surface
- if cohorts of devs on a FOSS project fall out with each other or strongly disagree, you can just fork the code and then there’ll be two competing options, market decides which is better. Again for Bitcoin, these forks are much scarier and mutually destructive than say forking Nginx or Redis or GPG because none of them are literally money (endogenous vs exogenous value)
- Living software changes and gets new features, if it doesn’t it’s dead or dying and that’s bad. For Bitcoin, this doesn’t hold. (Change in a functional sense, not ensuring it continues to run, which is maintenance)
- it’s a piece of FOSS so it is and only is a software engineering product. Change proposals are viewed as a software eng and developer agreement issue, ignoring the wider commercial and economic interest and properties of Bitcoin
- it doesn’t matter if we add a feature not everyone wants to use, it doesn’t really affect them if they don’t use it. Again not true of Bitcoin, we’re hyper-paranoid about unintended side-effects, incentive changes (again econ/human action not a software problem!) and increased attack surface
- if cohorts of devs on a FOSS project fall out with each other or strongly disagree, you can just fork the code and then there’ll be two competing options, market decides which is better. Again for Bitcoin, these forks are much scarier and mutually destructive than say forking Nginx or Redis or GPG because none of them are literally money (endogenous vs exogenous value)
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