🐢 Slow And Steady Bitcoin — Issue No. 12
/🗞 News
Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) #156 is nearing completion, with the pull request having been opened this week. The upgrade changes the way transactions are propagated through the network, preventing deanonymization by nefarious nodes in the network. Link.The basic idea is surprisingly easy to comprehend: transactions propagate in a linear fashion through a set of random nodes before "fluffing out" to the rest of the network. This is referred to as a "dandelion relay" strategy, and you can read about it in the proposal itself. It's a great example of the slow and steady progress Bitcoin Core is making improving the foundations of the protocol. Link.
Perhaps slow and steady isn't a bad strategy when it comes to upgrading live blockchain networks. It was recently revealed Bitcoin Cash narrowly avoided a network-destroying chainsplit due to a vulnerability introduced by a simple code refactor. The bug was found and anonymously reported by Bitcoin Core developer Cory Fields, and was mitigated before anyone else noticed or exploited it. Cory's recounting of the process is well worth the read. Link.
The mirror image of Bitcoin Core's measured, steady approach to protocol changes is the Ethereum Foundation's aggressive plans for extensive network upgrades. In that spirit, Vitalik Buterin took to Twitter-- posting an epic 75 Tweet thread-- describing the past, present, and future of Proof-of-Stake research. My TL;DR take on the thread: this stuff is really hard, but some really smart folks from the Ethereum Foundation are working to make it happen. Link.
There is much truth to the saying that your greatest strengths are also your greatest weaknesses. While Bitcoin Core's deliberate approach makes it stable and reliable, it might also impede progress much needed to enable adoption. And while Ethereum's energetic and optimistic pursuit of protocol improvement may yield grand results, there's also a non-trivial risk of the network imploding in the process. Bitcoin Cash's near-miss demonstrates that as a real possibility. Granted, I place much greater stock in Ethereum's developers than I do in Bitcoin Cash's developers. Still, the changes being proposed are extremely complex. Regardless of what happens, one thing is sure: exciting times are ahead!