BIP Bounties To Change Bitcoin Development – Bitcoin Magazine
This is an opinion editorial by Ariel Deschapell, co-founder of multi-cloud hosting platform Hydra Host, senior fellow at Lincoln Network and a team member at BIPBounty.org.
The idea that Bitcoin lacks innovation compared to other cryptocurrencies is pervasive, but is it true?
The Bitcoin protocol undergoes significant changes much more slowly than other cryptocurrencies, the latest, of course, being the implementation and activation of Taproot. But this is a feature, not a bug.
As the foundation of a massive open source ecosystem, changes should be well thought out and should consistently demonstrate widespread consensus that the benefits of the change outweigh the costs. While true and generally accepted, this mindset can also be a cop out. It is important to recognize the necessity of consensus, but we need to think deeply about what consensus means, how it is achieved and how we can potentially improve how it happens.
Overall, the idea that slow development is a better pattern is simply a terrible heuristic and a false dichotomy. The options available to the Bitcoin community’s protocol development are infinitely more varied and nuanced than simply “slow” or “fast”. Careful, comprehensive, deliberate, inclusive; all of these adjectives do a much better job of describing what the Bitcoin community should actually aim to facilitate. This explicit formulation is important, for all the values we subscribe to will be used to judge initiatives and efforts, and the only hopeful ideal worse than slow is likely fast.
The simple passage of time does nothing on its own to ensure that a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) gets more eyeballs, reviews, serious consideration or engagement. It also does nothing to ensure that the developer community focuses its limited efforts and attention on the right areas.
Correct framing
If we’re trying to defend innovation in the Bitcoin community, the easiest way to do it would be to point to the truly expansive body of ongoing research and development in the bitcoin-dev mailing group and other forums for technical information exchange. It is undeniable that Bitcoin has a huge mindshare of world-class programmers, cryptographers, mathematicians, economists and more. These individuals continue to wrestle with key issues, such as implementing greater degrees of privacy, and scaling the larger Bitcoin network to global throughput without losing the very properties that make it Bitcoin.
This community is delightfully and intentionally unstructured and informal. There is no standardized process by which any idea or suggestion can be included in Bitcoin. The only way for a proposal to reach eventual inclusion is to receive the extensive attention, support, and subsequent work from the community required to do so. From the research and analysis required to convince the community that the benefits significantly outweigh the costs, to the breakdowns and communication required to motivate the wider ecosystem to upgrade software and prepare use cases, to the actual work of finalizing and deploying the code itself.
Maintaining and superimposing this process is essential, and while it will always be slower than a standardized and formalized system in a relative sense, there is always room for improvement to make it happen more efficiently on its own terms.
Fixed incentives
The knee-jerk impulse to fight any claim that the Bitcoin development process is not ideal, or that it could benefit from improvement, is usually based on the implicit assumption that any effort to improve it necessarily means adding more centralization and control. However, this is far from true. Just as the Lightning Network debunked the claim that increasing transaction scalability necessitated increasing the block size.
Likewise, BIP premiums are an attempt to improve the incentives that drive Bitcoin development and consensus building. Managed by the Lincoln Network, a non-profit organization focused on advancing technologies that support human freedom, BIPBounty.org collects donations to fund standardized bounties earmarked for specific BIPs. Although it currently only displays one bounty, this structure is designed to achieve the following:
- Through tax credits, it encourages community members and organizations to show interest in and financial support for proposals by putting their money where their mouth is.
- It gives the open source bitcoin development community strong comparative signals about which areas the community is most interested in and which have higher potential financial returns for them to adjust their focus.
- The bounty options for BIPs are designed to move the ball forward on concrete deliverables, and represent the inputs necessary for the community to reach consensus (or not) on a particular proposal. This includes written reviews, analyses, and various classes of bug or vulnerability discoveries.
- It does all of the above in an opt-in and non-centralizing way that maintains the spirit of the Bitcoin project. Many developers may not pay any special interest for bounties, and that’s okay too.
Starting with BIP119
BIPBounty.org sprung as a concept from the BIP119 controversy. In December 2021, BIP’s author, Jeremy Rubin, placed a bug bounty on his own BIP via Twitter.
Very quickly, other supporters of the BIP threw in their hats and offered their own freebies. The total bounty amount snowballed quickly. That this happened completely spontaneously and organically was a huge sign of the pent-up community’s willingness and demand to dedicate financial resources to move the ball forward on discourse and consensus.
Naturally, BIPBounty.org has started with the BIP119 bounties, but as a project it has no goals in regards to any specific BIP. The goal is to encompass all BIPs and let the Bitcoin community decide for themselves which proposals are of greater interest and worthy of their tax-deductible contribution.
Starting
BIPBounty.org is new and trying to tackle an ambitious problem. The hypothesis with which we will evaluate our efforts is that there is community interest in such an endeavor beyond a one-off interest in the context of a single BIP. By enabling that, we can sustainably accelerate research and development deliverables and discourse across BIPs.
All this requires community buy-in and commitment. And most crucial at this early stage is feedback. To that end, we at Lincoln Network hope that the best and brightest in the Bitcoin community will continue to engage with us and assist us in our efforts to drive efficient, collaborative and sustainable Bitcoin development.
This is a guest post by Ariel Deschapel. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
