Bitcoin core developers have long argued over Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) to address the protocol’s vulnerabilities, as was evident in a heated panel discussion during Bitcoin Amsterdam 2023.
Longtime Bitcoin developers Paul Sztorc and Peter Todd brought this up in Amsterdam, with the latter appearing highly critical of Sztorc’s work in advancing drivechains.
Sztorc’s LayerTwo Labs has been working on BIP-300 for almost six years, which is committed to creating Layer 2 sidechains that have the potential to solve multiple problems without requiring base layer changes to the Bitcoin protocol.
The ensuing, at times heated debate in which Todd spoke about Sztorc highlighted the difficulty of reaching consensus on BIPs that could potentially improve the overall functionality of the Bitcoin protocol.
Jameson Lopp, co-founder and chief technology officer of Bitcoin (BTC) custody company Casa, weighed in on the topic during an in-depth interview with Cointelegraph at the conference, saying that the pace of improvements and protocol changes has slowed more than he would have liked .
This has changed somewhat in recent weeks with the emergence of new projects such as BitVM and SpiderChain, as Lopp explains, leading him to believe that some proposed soft forks could well be beneficial for the future of the protocol:
“In general, I think Bitcoin should implement features that improve its ability to be what you might call a cryptographic accumulator. Bitcoin should enable features that increase the performance of the second layer.”
Lopp adds that any potential “core ossification” that some maximalists have advocated for in the past would have stifled innovation that would have led to the creation of solutions like the Lightning Network, which has helped the Bitcoin network scale to Process transactions better.
“Without OP_CLTV, Lightning wouldn’t really be possible. It might have been possible, but without SegWit it would be really cumbersome. And without OP_CSV, it wouldn’t be possible to have unlimited long-lived Lightning channels.”
Lopp pointed to CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY (OP_CSV) and CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY (OP_CLTV) – two BIPs conducted to enable payment channels as soft forks. Written by Todd, OP_CLTV describes a Bitcoin opcode that allows a transaction output to be rendered unusable until a certain point in the future.
Related: Bitcoin Amsterdam: Focus on BTC fundamentals, says Edward Snowden
Lopp adds that while the Bitcoin protocol could become static because there is no consensus on proposed improvements to the base layer, developers will likely continue to build in a way that doesn’t require permissions:
“If it’s not possible to implement a solution that can be optimally implemented on top of the base layer of the base protocol, then we generally see that in many cases solutions are kind of bolted on.”
The Casa exec is convinced that if Bitcoin stops growing, users will inevitably move to storing and using BTC through a “handful of Bitcoin banks, also custodians and exchanges,” which comes with significant compromises:
“Then they’re promissory notes, right? That’s not the future I think any of us want to see.”
As Cointelegraph previously reported, Bitcoin advocates and analysts at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2023 highlighted the growing importance of the cryptocurrency’s value proposition and hard money properties amid a protracted bear market.
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