Conservatism, in a literal rather than political sense, has always been a core part of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Satoshi himself was very careful and thorough in his attempts at the original design, and the developers have since tried to be very careful and thorough in the development process after his passing.
Many pieces of technology were originally developed for Bitcoin, and were eventually tested on other networks precisely because of this caution. Secret transactions, one of the core pieces of technology underpinning Monero? He was Created by Gregory Maxwell for Bitcoin. It was not implemented due to significant shortcomings in terms of data volume, and due to the fact that it fundamentally changed the encryption assumptions.
All cryptographic processes used in Bitcoin are based on the discrete record assumption, which is that factoring two prime numbers of sufficiently large size is not possible. If this assumption is broken, everyone's private keys are hackable from their public keys. Secret transactions, and how they work, would allow someone to secretly inflate the money supply rather than just cracking other people's keys, and no one would be able to find out because it obscures transaction amounts from public view.
Likewise, the SNARK scheme used in Zcash to provide zero-knowledge proofs for Bitcoin was originally proposed for Bitcoin, Zerocoin. This has never been applied, out of caution, to Bitcoin itself. The entire encryption system relies on trusted third parties configuring it, and in order to remain secure, it requires users to trust them to delete the private key material used to configure the system. This was considered an unacceptable trade-off for Bitcoin.
Even Taproot, which has been active for three years or so now, is a proposal that ultimately consists of two separate concepts dating back to early 2012. Signature MAST and Schnorr. MAST is the idea of taking several possible spending scripts and turning them into a Merkle tree, so that only the path used on the chain is revealed. It took 9 years for these two ideas to go from being ideas to something that was actually implemented.
Conservatism has always been at the core of how this protocol and network was developed.
Recent proposals
I personally have been very skeptical of any proposals put forward in the past few years since Taproot was activated, preferring to be very conservative in what I choose to support. For example, I've been calling for BIP 119, CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY, for many years because of how discreet and simple it is. That is, because of what he does no maybe.
Mechanically, CTV cannot enable anything that is not already possible using pre-signed transactions, and the only difference between that and CTV is that one is enforced by consensus, and the other is enforced through trust in the people who previously signed those transactions.
My main focus is to consider the proposed changes always Unintended or harmful consequences were identified. My criticism of chains of command is a perfect example of this. Chains of command were introduced as a solution to scale without any negative externalities to the rest of the network. I have argued for years, initially on my own, that this statement is factually incorrect. I have outlined the arguments why this is not true, and what negative consequences the network might have if it were activated.
Most of my interest in other recent Charter proposals essentially boils down to one thing: enabling some variation in chains of command. Chains of command, or similar systems, allow anyone to be the producer of the blocks and move the state of the system forward. In practice, this means that miners have a de facto monopoly on participation in the process if they choose to exercise it. If such a system actually gains adoption, and enables functionality that gives miners space to extract initial-value transactions, as is the case in other systems like Ethereum, then this is an economic incentive for them to exercise this monopoly.
This represents centralized mining pressure, and once such systems are enabled, there is no way to limit the functionality that these other layers or blockchains enable, so there is no way to limit them to a degree of functionality that does not cause those issues. What you need to build such a system is the ability to restrict where coins can go in the future, i.e. a charter, and the ability to ensure data travels from one transaction to another.
This allows you to create an open UTXO that anyone (read: miners) can commit to to facilitate withdrawal, and can be allowed to complete or “cancel” it if it is invalid. This, combined with the ability to have a second layer status, or user money balances, changed and updated by anyone according to the rules of the system, gives you a chain-of-command-like system. If you have a closed, authorized group of people who can process withdrawals, like a federation, or a closed, authorized group that can update the state of the system, again like a federation, you won't have a system like a chain of command. It doesn't introduce the kinds of MEV risks and centralization pressures that I'm concerned about. For that to happen, both linking and state updating would have to be open systems that anyone can participate in, and by consensus effectively open to monopoly by miners.
This has been my objection to whether the proposal is too liberal in terms of what it allows for more than half a decade. This is not to say that this is a hard line that should never be crossed, but it is a line that should not be crossed without a rational plan for how to deal with and mitigate the potential centralizing pressures it could enable if they actually occur.
Slow and steady worship
As someone who has been a conservative voice for half a decade, criticizing the proposals from a deeply skeptical and paranoid point of view, rational skepticism and caution are essentially dead. Except for a small group or group of people who have drowned in the sea of noise, there is no longer a rational analysis in calling for caution and slowness.
There is a fat, lazy entitlement that demands everything be spoon-fed. The moment the spoon gets close to the mouth, it is slapped away. “How dare you try to feed me!” The last time there was actual disagreement over a proposal before the current Covenant debate was the Bloc Wars. People actually engaged with the issues at hand, and people made an effort to learn and inquire in an open way. Yes, there were the lunatics and the ideological lunatics, the people who didn't want to engage in honest debate.
That was not the majority of people at that time. Even a large portion of the big bans when challenged will not just devolve into dogmatic rants, they will run numbers. They will engage in a discussion about where there is a reasonable line in terms of block size, and what externalities or costs this might present to users. On our side, the winning side, many people joined precisely because of these kind of discussions and logical arguments.
I supported the first proposal to increase block size, Bitcoin XT. I changed my mind due to logical inquiry and discussion. I considered it What could actually go wrong?And then investigate how bad those consequences are. I took time to better understand things I didn't understand at the time. This is not what happens anymore.
People hesitate and throw up the phrase “unknown unknowns” as a counter-argument to any proposed change. That's not a valid or intellectually honest response to anything. Everything has an unknown unknown. Doing nothing has an unknown unknown, doing one conservative change has an unknown unknown, and doing everything at once has an unknown unknown. That's the whole nature of that logical class of things, you don't know what you don't know.
This is a meaningless, non-negotiable argument that can be endlessly withdrawn and never satisfied. It's not a real attempt to engage in dialogue, but rather a denial-of-service attack against it.
There are some known things, aspects or consequences of changes that we are aware of but are not sure how they occurred. This is a rational line of inquiry when discussing change. Some aspects or possibilities with uncertain outcomes can be identified and can be discussed. This is not just a rational inquiry, but I believe it is a very important and necessary inquiry in the discussion of changes to Bitcoin.
Just go “Anonymous Anonymous!” The response to every proposal, every discussion of the advantages, and every analysis of the negatives to present a balanced view of things is not a rational response. It's not good faith. By the inherent nature of the unknown, this is impossible to address Either way. Both changing Bitcoin and not changing it represent equal risk of the unknown, it is inherent in the nature of that thing.
There is an astonishing lack of self-awareness at the intellectual level of this, and a flood of people showing emotional impulsiveness regarding acting upon this lack of self-awareness in public discussion.
Denial of service attack
It is bad enough not to engage in curiosity in private when faced with new information, or in the case of proposals related to Bitcoin specifically, and it is even worse to take this lack of curiosity into public discourse. This constant chanting of “the unknown unknown” and “the default is unchangeable” and all the other incantations of ossification that go so far as to clearly not be a dialogue. It is denial of service.
Doing nothing but engaging in an impossible-to-meet bar setting, disrupting any further discussion or conversation that attempts to clarify or expand everyone's understanding of the trade-offs or functions, and then continually doing so over and over again is not engaging in good faith. This does not mean trying to evaluate whether a change is safe or not, nor does it attempt to measure the probability or risk level of unintended consequences, but rather is just a reckless attempt to stop any and all change for the sake of change.
This is not rational. This is frankly not rational.
It's like exercising your veto power over anything and everything, and yes, veto power is important in consensus systems. But disrupting the conversation is not a veto, rather the actions of the economic actors actually interacting and deciding what programs to run or not to run are. This denial of service dialogue is not a noble or righteous crusade to save Bitcoin, but rather an active attack on those economic actors and their ability to gain a better understanding of making an informed decision about whether or not to veto something.
It's malicious, it's bad faith.
I personally think this is motivated by fear. The fear is that given the ability to inform themselves, the economic majority will choose differently from individuals who engage in this way in the conversation. I can't really see any charitable explanation other than outright stupidity.
The environment in which these conversations take place is no longer well-intentioned, and that's not because of people actually proposing changes, but because of people who bury their heads in the sand and constantly perform a denial-of-service attack on the conversation itself. People who refuse to actually admit what they don't know. This is it a favour unknown If you are honest with yourself. What you don't understand, or what you don't understand well. However, some people, who are so anxious about the unknown, refuse to fill in the gaps in their known unknowns.
They refuse to learn more about things they do not understand well. This would be one thing if it was just a quiet choice of the individual, but it's a whole different thing when these people choose to actively interfere in the broader conversation and try to mislead or push others away from doing it themselves.
It's ironic in a way, since this is happening in parallel with ordinal numbers and people claiming we need to “filter spam”. Maybe we should. Not on the blockchain, because that's not possible if the system's incentives aren't fundamentally broken, but in conversations around that blockchain.
This isn't a good faith dialogue anymore, not because jpeg people are talking about cats, but because the “other side” is basically refusing service and attacking everyone else, preventing them from even having a conversation about whether or not we like cats (or dogs) at all.
