December 15, 2018
Understanding how the focal point of Bitcoin development operates.
This article by Jameson Lopp was published in his blog.
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if you’d prefer to consume this essay in audio format, you can listen to it here (narrated by Guy Swann of the Bitcoin Audible Podcast.)
The question of who controls the ability to merge code changes into Bitcoin Core’s GitHub repository tends to come up on a recurring basis. This has been cited as a “central point of control” of the Bitcoin protocol by various parties over the years, but I argue that the question itself is a red herring that stems from an authoritarian perspective — this model does not apply to Bitcoin. It’s certainly not obvious to a layman as to why that is the case, thus the goal of this article is to explain how Bitcoin Core operates and, at a higher level, how the Bitcoin protocol itself evolves.
...December 19, 2019
How Bitcoin Thrives on the Edge between Order and Chaos
This article by Gigi was published on dergigi.com website.
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if you’d prefer to consume this essay in audio format, you can listen to it here (narrated by Guy Swann of the Bitcoin Audible Podcast.)
Bitcoin works. No matter what other opinions you hold about this strange phenomenon, it undoubtedly works, marches on, or, as I (and others) have previously argued, is alive. Even if most of the world would grind to a halt, the Bitcoin network would continue to produce valid blocks every 10 minutes or so.
...September 20, 2020
This article by Gigi was published on swanbitcoin.com website.
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Why the internet doesn’t feel as clumsy anymore is twofold: (1) we got used to the novel concepts the internet brought with it, and (2) countless layers of abstraction make interacting with the base layer easier.
There is an ongoing discussion in the Bitcoin space revolving around the topic of user experience, or UX for short. Bitcoin still feels weird, clunky, and complicated at times. The main reason for this is that Bitcoin and its parts (the network, the protocol, the cryptography, the scripting language) are indeed weird, clunky, and complicated. Just like the internet was and arguably, still is.
...November 3, 2024
An impassioned argument for why we should continue striving to improve the Bitcoin protocol.
This article by Jameson Lopp was published in his blog
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Note: if you’d prefer to consume this essay in audio format, you can listen to it here (narrated by Guy Swann of the Bitcoin Audible Podcast.)
Ossification in the context of network protocols refers to the slowdown in their evolution and rate of change. It appears to be a law of network physics. Essentially, as a network protocol achieves greater adoption, the “mass” of the network grows and the effort required to alter the direction of the network by coordinating software updates across the users of the protocol increases substantially. Eventually, the ability to safely activate any protocol changes is crushed under the massive weight of the network as it becomes impossible to coordinate massive numbers of decentralized actors.
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