I tweeted this [0] back in November 2022.
"With the btcd bugs and the analysis paralysis on a RBF policy option in Core
increasingly thinking @BitcoinKnots and consensus compatible forks of Core are
the future. Gonna chalk that one up to another thing @LukeDashjr was right
about all along."
A new bare bones Knots style Bitcoin implementation (in C++/C) integrated with
Core Lightning was a long term idea I had (and presumably many others have had)
but the dysfunction on the Bitcoin Core project this week (if anything it has
been getting worse over time, not better) has made me start to take the idea
more seriously. It is clear to me that the current way the Bitcoin Core project
is being managed is not how I would like an open source project to be managed.
Very little discussion is public anymore and decisions seem to be increasingly
made behind closed doors or in private IRC channels (to the extent that
decisions are made at all). Core Lightning seems to have the opposite problem.
It is managed effectively in the open (admittedly with fewer contributors) but
doesn't have the eyeballs or the usage that Bitcoin Core does. Regardless,
selfishly I at some point would like a bare bones Bitcoin and Lightning
implementation integrated in one codebase. The Bitcoin Core codebase has
collected a lot of cruft over time and the ultra conservatism that is needed
when treating (potential) consensus code seems to permeate into parts of the
codebase that no one is using, definitely isn't consensus code and should
probably just be removed.
The libbitcoinkernel project was (is?) an attempt to extract the consensus
engine out of Core but it seems like it won't achieve that as consensus is just
too slippery a concept and Knots style consensus compatible codebase forks of
Bitcoin Core seem to still the model. To what extent you can safely chop off
this cruft and effectively maintain this less crufty fork of Bitcoin Core also
isn't clear to me yet.
Then there is the question of whether it makes sense to mix C and C++ code that
people have different views on. C++ is obviously a superset of C but assuming
this merging of Bitcoin Core and Core Lightning is/was the optimal final
destination it surely would have been better if Core Lightning was written in
the same language (i.e. with classes) as Bitcoin Core.
I'm just floating the idea to (hopefully) hear from people who are much more
familiar with the entirety of the Bitcoin Core and Core Lightning codebases. It
would be an ambitious long term project but it would be nice to focus on some
ambitious project(s) (even if just conceptually) for a while given (thankfully)
there seems to be a lull in soft fork activation chaos.
Thanks
Michael
[0]:
https://twitter.com/michaelfolkson/status/1589220155006910464?s=20&t=GbPm7w5BqS7rS3kiVFTNcw
--
Michael Folkson
Email: michaelfolkson at [protonmail.com](http://protonmail.com/)
Keybase: michaelfolkson
PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3
_______________________________________________
bitcoin-dev mailing list
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
