Awemany's recent

paper

has been used by many people as evidence to suggest that ABC's canonical transaction ordering is misguided and rushed. I think Awemany is a very smart and capable developer but I think he makes some mistakes in his analysis which I will highlight here. But before I begin I want the reader to understand the motivation for canonical ordering. The primary issue that the current ordering consensus rule is burdensome for implementations seeking to parallelize much of the work of validating and creating blocks. As was mentioned by Shammah Chancellor in his recent

article

, while it's true that Moore's law suggests that computers are getting faster, the way they are getting faster is by adding more CPU cores not really by increasing the speed of each individual core. All current Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash implementations are written in such a way that most of the work is done on a single CPU core meaning the software is not taking advantage of the underlying resources available to it and it's also not well positioned to take advantage of Moore's law. Simply buying more expensive hardware will not improve the performance of a Bitcoin node as that money will buy you more cores but the software simply will not use them. Craig Wright's alleged 2015 experiment showing 2.6M transactions per second was run on a machine with 265,450 cores. This is funny because while you can spend an arm and a leg on a machine with 265,450 cores, the software will still continue to use only one. Yes, you can parallelize

part

of the work to validate a block if you keep the existing ordering rule, but you will never be able to parallelize all of it as you'll always need to do at least some work serially to validate the current consensus rule (more on this below). So the primary argument coming from ABC is that the current ordering rule needs to go. For the purpose of parallelization simply removing the ordering rule and allowing transactions to be in any order would work, but if you've already accepted the removal of the existing ordering rule, it's a much smaller mental leap to see that introducing a new, canonical, ordering would provide additional benefits (like graphene and exclusion proofs) beyond what you would get with a no-ordering rule. So with that said let's turn to Awemany's arguments.

This completely overlooks the key reason why blocks are ordered the way they are and is the root of most of the problems with the arguments that follow from here. They are clearly NOT ordered like this because of an accident, they are ordered like this because it is the natural order. It is the order by which transactions can be generated, if one would have an omniscient view. [...] If you think of Bitcoin as an incentivized timestamping system, then all data that comes into the system naturally follows what is named TTOR by the authors (and what is named natural order herein). Blocks serve as structured time stamps of this data and giving a unique order to what uncertainty remains in the system due to physical laws and its consequences (propagation delays etc.).