Damus
Luke Dashjr
Recent notes
Bitcoin is not a finished product. We may be on a detour to address spam, and part of the crisis did originate with (mishandling of) the Segwit and Taproot upgrades - but to improve the world, we still need more functionality. Stopping all improvements forever ("ossifying") is fatal. Part of addressing the issues with Core needs to be ensuring we don't repeat the same mistakes: if an upgrade introduces unforeseen vulnerabilities, those need to get addressed in a timely manner. All protocol changes require support from the entire community, so we developers are going to have to earn that reputation back. There are fairly simple, low-risk softforks like CTV, or even a consensus cleanup (though I have reservations about BIP 54), that should not introduce vulnerabilities, and could be a starting point to regain confidence after Core is out of the picture. The next step up is probably native zero-knowledge support, BitVM optimisations, and similar. This is when it *might* make sense to start considering Bitcoin L1 "complete", and capable of handling further improvements and even scaling on true trustless sidechains. We have a long road to get there still, and every step will take consensus - possibly quick mitigation of unforeseen outcomes - but we shouldn't lose sight of the end goal: a decentralised currency that nobody can undermine, and hopefully one day onboard the entire global economy. It's possible to accomplish, but we will have to work for it.
Be careful out there... The bad actors are now attacking individual Knots nodes. If you have data limits, pay a visit to the maxuploadtarget option (in the GUI under Options -> Network tab -> Try to keep upload traffic under ____ MiB per day - only in Knots) https://x.com/nazgulHODL/status/1959009018602537450?t=aWEE2gViZAAJWTUZGPP5FQ&s=19
4 different solo miners using OCEAN also found blocks this week: - 888094 found by Penguin - 888283 found by Munich International Mining - 888418 found by ZettaPOW - 888908 found by Elektron Energy