At the Baltic Honeybadger Bitcoin Conference in Latvia, developers gathered for a candid discussion about protocol evolution. The panel touched on a subject many in the community had been hesitant to
At the Baltic Honeybadger Bitcoin Conference in Latvia, developers gathered for a candid discussion about protocol evolution. The panel touched on a subject many in the community had been hesitant to voice openly: Bitcoin's political fragmentation had made future upgrades far more difficult to execute.
The issue came down to a fundamental split. Miners and developers had grown apart. Their incentives no longer aligned. SegWit's path to activation had exposed this fracture in severe terms, and the wounds remained fresh.
Peter Todd, an applied cryptography consultant who also contributes to Bitcoin Core, offered a frank assessment of the situation. He traced the root back to how SegWit had been forced onto the network. Developers, frustrated by mining resistance, resorted to a user-activated soft fork—essentially allowing full nodes to implement the change whether miners approved or not. This nuclear option had worked. But it had also set a new tone.
"I could easily see us wanting to make changes for many reasons," Todd said during the panel. "And I think what's happened with SegWit [and how] it got forced in through, ultimately, a user-activated soft fork — I think we're now in a political situation where the next round of changes, be it MAST or some privacy improvement or Schnorr or who knows what, is going to be really, really ugly because it's going to get used as a way to hurt Bitcoin to aid altcoins. I don't think we're in a position where we really have miners on our side these days. I think we're in a position where there's a lot of very entrenched interests, and it's not going to be a very clean soft fork like was previously [seen]."
Todd's concern about altcoins was specific. Miners, he suggested, might obstruct improvements to Bitcoin in order to make competing coins more attractive. Bitcoin Cash was the obvious example. If Bitcoin moved too slowly and Bitcoin Cash moved fast, hash power could migrate. Miners could profitably mine whichever chain paid better in the moment.
This hostile environment struck Todd as a recent phenomenon. Early in his involvement with Bitcoin, he had authored CheckLockTimeVerify, an improvement to the protocol. It faced minimal resistance. The community pulled in the same direction then. Those days seemed distant now.
Eric Lombrozo, the CEO of Ciphrex and another Bitcoin Core contributor, offered a more measured take on the politicization of Bitcoin development. His observation started from a simple truth. "People are prone to politicize just about anything," Lombrozo said.
But he also argued that earlier soft forks hadn't provoked the same contention because they lacked economic impact. They were opt-in features. A user uninterested in a new capability could ignore it without consequence. The system's incentive layer remained untouched.
SegWit changed that calculus. "With SegWit, even though it is in a sense opt-in, the fact is if you do want to fully verify, you're going to have to validate more data," Lombrozo explained. "This does change the incentives of the system."
The upgrade had consequences for node operators and miners alike. That was where the politics had entered. Miners had resisted SegWit's activation for a long period. Lombrozo hinted at conflicts of interest, though he stopped short of stating it outright. He referenced the Asicboost situation, a technology that mining operations may have benefited from and that certain upgrades might have endangered.
Despite these political headwinds, Lombrozo maintained confidence in the technical plane. The breakthroughs in recent years had been substantial. Developers had figured out how to upgrade Bitcoin without breaking it apart. But that technical prowess did not automatically translate to political success.
"Even though I'm very optimistic on the technology side — I think that in the last couple of years there's been tremendous breakthroughs in terms of how we can actually upgrade the system without breaking it at a technical level — on a political level, I think that we're still learning a lot of how to actually align incentives and how to make sure that the network doesn't break or fork in these kinds of situations," Lombrozo concluded.
Adam Gibson, who develops JoinMarket, pushed back against Todd's bleakness. Gibson believed SegWit had accomplished something significant. It proved miners do not control the protocol. They could not veto changes indefinitely. "Schnorr [signatures] seems to be one of the two or three things that are very likely to happen sort of next," Gibson said. "It's a huge deal for various reasons: privacy, scalability, [and] security even."
If miners tried to block an upgrade of that importance, Gibson was confident they would fail.
Todd raised a separate problem. He acknowledged that in earlier eras, miners signaling readiness through hashrate had created a system with apparent clarity. The mechanism had a mechanical beauty. But it had also given some observers the mistaken impression that miners controlled the rollout.
User-activated soft forks eliminated that false clarity. They introduced ambiguity. When it wasn't obvious whether an upgrade had genuine support, critics could more easily claim Bitcoin Core had seized control and forced a change.
"That's a much cleaner, simpler system than I think UASFs where it's always kind of unclear: Does this really have support?" Todd said. "And if it is unclear . . . it's very easy to then portray it as, 'No, Bitcoin Core is pushing this. Now, Bitcoin Core is in control, and they're dictating a change.'"
The panel participants never reached consensus on a solution. No one identified a reliable method to measure what the broader Bitcoin user base wanted from a protocol change.
Adam Back, the CEO of Blockstream, addressed the question of Schnorr signatures without claiming any guarantee of support. He offered a path forward anyway. "It's just an opt-in improvement, and presumably it will be done with BIP 8 or something else, so that there's no veto mechanism built-in," Back said. BIP 8 is a deployment mechanism that permits the network to upgrade even if miners refuse to signal approval.
