Bitcoin social media is making lots of noise about Segwit and XT/Classic/BU for approximately a year. I just want to share my personal code monkey perspective on it.

A noisy history

Back when XT appeared, I gave it the benefit of the doubt, and even started coding a spamming service so that we could test if Bitcoin was still working with lots of transactions ahead of time. I stopped when I saw other people doing the spamming attack, and it confirmed that, even if people were making lots of noise about it, Bitcoin was working as expected.

Some wallets adapted (Core included), making the next spamming attempts more and more boring, until people stop talking about it, as nobody cared.

Then came Classic. I was very open to the idea of 2MB HF, the only things that was holding me back was the decision to put the threshold at 75%, the poor skills and the petty political games of the classic team.

Then came BU, same as classic, an even worse idea, but with double down politics.

Anyway. I stepped away from the noise since Segwit proposal, as it was clear to me, after seeing Pieter Wuille’s presentation in Hong Kong, that was the best improvement proposed to Bitcoin so far.

As someone who invested lots of time on Segwit (by implementing it in NBitcoin, reviewing and testing), I was affected by trolls, as lots of other contributors. Luckily, as a coder, I am often driven by the positive feedback I get from other coders I respect, which kept me from dropping from Bitcoin.

How I got back my sanity

Bitcoin, even in its current form, can improve without permission, it is an exciting space. TumbleBit and Lightning Network are possible and will give solution to scale when the world will need it.

Segwit will be adopted by Litecoin, if I port NBitcoin to Litecoin, then I will finally have people using my segwit code for real transactions and get feedback from it.

Bitcoin Core is always moving forward with awesome features.

So I have been busy coding, largely ignoring the current drama, and I am happy with it. Lot’s of coder have taken the same path.

However, from the external perspective, it seems that developpers are not communicating with the community, which make a vacuum to fill for people with a big voice. To prevent that, Gregory Maxwell aka nullc, does an outstanding job at communicating on reddit.

Hiddens hands explains the technicals of Segwit on:

All of these articles take lots of review and work. The numbers of review for those articles are as high as the amount of review for each PR on Bitcoin Core.

As dev, as others, I never hesitate to explain to people the technicals of Segwit by giving talks, interviews, or writing articles. It is fun to talk about what excite me.

Meanwhile, I continue coding, I will continue to ignore arguments that are not technical, and refuse to talk with politicians.

I will continue to work towards making the scaling and fungibility problems obsolete, by building on top of what other devs and cryptographers are doing.

My advices

For coders, do not feed the troll, keep coding or helping people to understand.

For miners, do not talk to politicians. It is responsible behavior to not signal segwit because you are afraid it breaks something.

Talk to devs if you have questions, we are here for you. Just make sure to not wear a politician hat. I hope Litecoin will help you validate Segwit.

DO NOT block segwit for political reasons, you are playing with fire and will burn yourself, with collateral damages.

For the community. Bitcoin works great, step away from the drama and use it yourself. Also keep in mind that when a transaction is unconfirmed it does not mean you can’t spend it. (spending an unconfirmed transaction may even speed up confirmation time thanks to Child Pay For Parent)

Keep in mind that some people are paid to provoke division. And some are spreading division without knowing it. (Chinese miners are often misinterpreted because of language barrier)

For business. Do not assume bitcoin will do what you expect.

Maybe Bitcoin will never adopt segwit. Maybe Bitcoin will never get block size increase. I got burned by this one on some internal projects of my company.

Conclusion

Bitcoin is more awesome than ever. The number of coders grows, Core contributors are active as hell, adoption is growing, solutions to scaling are being developped and tested.

Blockchain as a Service hype is fading. Blockchain as in Bitcoin is growing.

To the moon!!! ┗(°0°)┛