Weekly Reconstruction: Finishing Satoshi’s Work

In less than a year I Announced on Twitter The idea behind the Bitcoin Script project. To say it was well received would be an understatement. Bitcoin investors were desperate for something they could cling to in the midst of the downturn. There was a glimmer of hope on the horizon, and I sought to amplify it and rally the industry around a new technology narrative. Unfortunately, life had other plans and, to put it simply, I quickly realized that I had bitten off more than I could chew at the time.

The Bitcoin Script project never saw the light of day. At best, it was a short-term social awareness campaign. It planted some ideas and moved the conversation forward. At least that’s probably why I have the privilege of writing this column today. I bring this up because my experience is no different than that of hundreds of individuals who have tried to leave their mark on Bitcoin. It is a humbling and thankless task. Wounded pride is common. Many people have put much more blood, sweat and tears on this front than I have.

But sometimes the stars align and our collective actions begin to transcend the interests of each individual. As you can see, Bitcoin moves according to its own rhythm. If you try to speed it up, the whole dance will stop. This synchronization task requires some serious patience.

Last week, just when the walls seemed to be closing in, the dance troupe finally performed together. And it was beautiful. After a long hiatus, optimism returned and I finally let go of fear, uncertainty and doubt. The opportunities ahead have spurred the developer community to undertake perhaps their most ambitious task yet.

Make your scripts great again

When I walked into the halls of the Palmer Events Center in Austin Wednesday morning, it was hard to ignore flashbacks from long ago.

An eerily similar incident occurred in Montreal, Canada in 2015, setting the tone for the next decade. Bitcoin expansion has reached a critical turning point in the project’s history as the community struggles to define its vision for the future. This event was for anyone who was young and nascent in the industry at the time. Bitcoin’s entire metaphorical brain is under one roof. Looking back, it’s scary.

I digress, but Bitcoin++ had a similar vibe last week. It was immediately apparent that there was a special energy in the building and the crowd was just as great. It’s a stark contrast to the typical conference roadshow and online antics we’ve become accustomed to.

No billboards, no 280-character tirade, and most importantly, no sales pitches.

At the start of the conference, it was difficult to ignore the momentum behind the OP_CAT proposal. The most staunch supporters would have been preparing to dedicate the event. A rough consensus became within reach, and even those who had originally dismissed it began to embrace the idea.

As fate would have it, at least one person had other plans, and the implications dawned on everyone in attendance in the first few minutes of the presentation.

“The Great Script Restoration Project” is Blockstream developer Rusty Russell’s attempt to flip the proverbial script on everyone. It is a journey to think about the ‘why’ behind the fuss of scripts and covenant proposals floating around these days. What are we trying to achieve?

How about modifying the Bitcoin script to return it to its former glory?

For context, a significant portion of Bitcoin Script functionality was suddenly removed in 2010 after it was discovered that certain features were vulnerable to resource depletion attacks (DDoS). Instead of solving the underlying problem, Satoshi threw the ax at everything he thought could be affected, and what we’re left with today is a mess of hacked-up byproducts. A lot of the conversation so far has been about patching the script with band-aids here and there to restore some functionality. This inevitably brings us to the dead end of horse trading and cycling.

The restoration project turns this approach on its head and proposes that we take the appropriate engineering steps to get there. If you agree with the destination, you should embrace this opportunity to change Bitcoin for the better. Political and social stigma, ossifiers be damned. The latter point cannot be overemphasized. Whether intentional or not, Rusty’s presentation feels like a call for developers to move away from dogma and embrace science in a new way.

The best way to captivate developers is to bombard them with data, benchmarks, and measurements. I’ll leave it to the more technical folks to explain the details of his framework, but it’s worth pointing out why it’s so effective. Rusty allows you to integrate all changes under the same umbrella by providing a model that describes the cost of each change involved. This is a significant departure from the traditional framework that pits all proposals against each other. Instead, we work together to fix what was previously thought to be abandoned and broken through thoughtful engineering.

Trust the process

To be clear, the ‘Script Restoration Project’ is not yet eligible as a proposal. It’s just a loose collection of ideas and a very initial suggestion of how we might approach it. The reason it received such a huge response in such a short period of time was because it was an opportunity to do something different. To finish Satoshi’s work.

For the first time in a very long time, the rough outlines of an agreement are being formed. Maybe not around proposals, but at least around processes. That’s progress.

“Let’s become an engineer. Let’s be objective and make a reasonable argument on this issue. That’s right. We will have to convince the rest of the world. But it’s a lot easier if we’re all moving in the same direction.” – Christian Decker