It is approximately 8 months since Steve Lee formally kicked off the Taproot activation discussion by setting up the ##taproot-activation IRC channel. Obviously there was discussion that considerably predates that but that was the first recognition that there needed to be a focus towards a solution rather than endless circular debates.
Eight months on it appears there are some who think there is a philosopher’s stone still out there that will garner 100 percent consensus and contain zero chain split risk in the worst case scenario. A philosopher’s stone that us mere mortals have failed to find in these 8 months. While I would be delighted if this philosopher’s stone is found (and all are free to continue looking) I think it is prudent at this point to step away from the circular arguments and build on the progress we have made in these last 8 months. We have effectively achieved overwhelming consensus on the activation mechanism (BIP 8) and all of the parameters apart from one (lockinontimeout or LOT). Again I’d like to thank the people who have put hours of work into getting to this point. It is thankless work and it is probably the last thing any of us want to be doing. At this point it is unclear whether Bitcoin Core will be able to release any activation code whatsoever due to disagreement logjams. Personally I hope they do but again it is prudent to prepare for the scenario where Core is unable to. Hence I and others have assessed that our energies are better spent working on a community release implementing LOT=true in a similar spirit to 2017’s UASF effort. I say similar as this time there really is no need for any antagonism. Approximately 90 percent of mining pools (taprootactivation.com) have declared support and there is overwhelming community consensus to activate Taproot. In the absence of a Core release with activation code I hope and expect all users (including miners) to consider supporting this UASF release and consider running it to activate Taproot. TL;DR Tomorrow (Tuesday) we are holding a kick off meeting for this UASF (LOT=true) effort on the ##uasf IRC channel at 19:00 UTC. Please consider attending and supporting this effort to get Taproot activated. It would be great to get users from the 2017 effort involved in addition to recent Taproot proponents from all parts of our community. The future of Bitcoin’s scalability and privacy depends on, as it always has, on you the user. -- Michael Folkson Email: [email protected] Keybase: michaelfolkson PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3 _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
