A little less than a year ago, I was Advertise on Twitter Bitcoin Script project idea. To say it was well received would be an understatement. Bitcoin users were longing for something they could hold onto in the middle of a bear. There were glimmers of hope on the horizon and I intended to amplify them and hopefully rally the industry around a new technology narrative. Unfortunately, life had other plans, and to make a long story short, I quickly realized that I had bitten off more than I could chew at that time.
The Bitcoin Script project never saw the light of day. At best, it was a short-term social awareness campaign. You planted some ideas and moved the conversation forward. At the very least, that's probably why I have the honor of working on this column today. I bring this up because my experience is no different from the experience of hundreds of individuals who have tried to leave their mark on Bitcoin. It is a humbling and thankless matter. Broken vanities are common. Many have left far more blood, sweat and tears than I have on this front.
But every now and then, the stars align and our collective actions begin to override each individual's own interests. As you can see, Bitcoin moves at its own rhythm. Try to increase the pace and the whole dance will be thrown away. This synchronization procedure requires serious patience.
Last week, when the walls seemed to be closing in, the dance group finally got its act together. And it was beautiful. After a long hiatus, optimism has returned and fear, uncertainty and doubt have finally been eliminated. The upcoming opportunity has galvanized the developer community to undertake perhaps its most ambitious work yet.
Make your script great again
As I entered the halls of the Palmer Events Center in Austin on Wednesday morning, it was hard to ignore flashbacks of days gone by.
Back in 2015, an eerily similar event occurred in Montreal, Canada, and set the tone for the next decade. Bitcoin scaling This project came at a critical juncture in the project's history – at a time when the community was struggling to define its vision for the future. The event was a who's who of the then emerging industry. The entire token brain of Bitcoin under one roof. Scary, in hindsight.
I digress, but Bitcoin++ Last week had similar reactions. You could tell right away that there was a special energy in the building and the crowd was nothing short of amazing. A stark contrast between the usual convention promotion and the online antics we've become accustomed to.
No billboards, no 280-character tirade, and most importantly, no sales pitches.
At the beginning of the conference, it was difficult to ignore the momentum behind the OP_CAT proposal. It is likely that her strongest supporters were preparing this event as a dedication to her. A rough consensus seemed within reach, and even those who had originally rejected it were receptive to the idea.
As fate would have it, at least one person had other plans, and in the first few minutes of his presentation, the implications dawned on everyone present.
“Great text restoration project“is Blockstream developer Rusty Russell's attempt to flip the proverbial script on everyone. It's a journey to think about the 'why' behind the confusion in the script and covenant proposals being thrown around these days. What are we trying to achieve?”
How about fixing the Bitcoin script and returning it to its former glory?
For context, much of Bitcoin's script capabilities were quickly removed in 2010 when it was revealed that certain functions were vulnerable to DoS attacks. Instead of addressing the underlying problem, Satoshi scrapped everything he thought might be affected, and the distorted and compromised byproduct is what we're left with today. There's been a lot of talk so far about patching scripts with bandages here and there to restore some functionality. This inevitably dragged us into the dead end of horse trading and bike sales.
The restoration project turns this approach on its head and suggests we take the appropriate engineering steps to get there. If we agree on the destination, we must seize this opportunity to change Bitcoin for the better. Damn political and social stigmas and fossils. This last point cannot be stressed enough. Whether intentional or not, Rusty's presentation feels like a call for developers to free themselves from dogma and embrace science anew.
It turns out that the best way to attract developers is to bombard them with data, standards, and metrics. I'll leave it to more technical people to work out the details of its framework, but it's worth pointing out why it's proven to be effective. By providing a model to calculate the cost of each associated change, Rusty allows us to unify them all under the same umbrella. This is a major departure from the current framework that pits each proposal against the other. Instead, we work together to fix what was previously abandoned and thought to be broken using thoughtful engineering.
Trust the process
To be clear, the “Great Text Recovery Project” hardly qualifies as a proposal yet. It's just a loose collection of ideas and some early suggestions on how to approach it. The reason it has gained so much attention in such a short time is because it is an opportunity to do things differently. To terminate Satoshi's work.
For the first time in a long time, some rough outlines of consensus are beginning to take shape. Maybe not about a proposition, but at least about the process. This is progress.
“Let's be engineers. Let's be objective and let's have rational arguments about these things. Yes, we will have to convince the rest of the world, but that will be much easier if we are all pulling in the same direction.” – Christian Decker