Bitcoin developers sign statement supporting soft fork

On Monday, over 60 engineers from across the Bitcoin ecosystem signed a statement officially stating their support for the next Bitcoin soft fork.

It’s the most well supported proposal in a few years, with engineers coming from across the Bitcoin ecosystem, including pools, custody providers, hardware companies, researchers, wallet developers, and financial product teams.

We’ve obviously written a lot on this proposal–over 27 articles and podcasts over the past one and half years plus two conferences–so this can feel a bit like beating a dead horse.

However, something might be happening this time, we promise. 

Explain it like I’m 5 

A large group of Bitcoin engineers are finally in agreement on Bitcoin’s next soft fork. They’re calling for a six month timeline to review and formalize the proposal. 

Maybe this is the beginning of Bitcoin’s next soft fork? More below!

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What is it?

The fork is a combination of 2 Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs): BIP-119, OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY (CTV) and BIP-348, OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACK (CSFS). 

The proposal is called “CTV + CSFS” and would enable a broad set of uses, such as: major improvements to Lightning, coordination-free mining pool payouts, and forms of transaction introspection.

TL;DR: It does a few things really well that many users want, like wallets and Lightning developers. But it doesn’t do “too much.” 

It’s also well tested and considered to be a low risk upgrade.

Why is this significant?

It seems like we see a new effort to “build consensus” every few months – why is this one different? 

Official support signaling for CTV is almost half a decade old now but a few things have changed.

First, this is the broadest cohort of engineers who are simultaneously in agreement. The statement also calls for a specific timeline and contains specific asks for Bitcoin Core to prioritize reviewing the proposal.

Second, this comes at an interesting time for Bitcoin Core. 

As the OP_RETURN drama likely comes to a conclusion, a recent statement from Core maintainer Gloria Zhao seems to indicate that consensus changes may actually be on the table: 

“Bitcoin’s long term success relies on us frying some much bigger fish than mempool policy defaults. Learning how to bring the community to technical consensus is more challenging and important than ever”

What happens next?

Noticeably absent from this statement is the phrase “activation client.” Frankly, we have seen just about everything we can expect from the developer community short of acknowledgement and/or endorsement from Bitcoin Core. 

The next event to wait for is an activation client.

An activation client is a modified version of Bitcoin software (such as a modified Bitcoin Core) that allows users/miners/node operators to signal support for proposed protocol upgrades then lock those upgrades in. 

However, releasing a client is historically controversial. For example, Taproot’s Speedy Trial went mostly well. Jeremy Rubin’s 2022 CTV activation client did not fare as hot, with Rubin taking a step back from Bitcoin following the backlash. Basically, expect to get dragged on Twitter by a lot of nerds if you launch an activation client.

Still, if Bitcoin Core does assign developers to review the subject, we could see a client pop up from the Core project itself (emphasis on ‘could’).

The alternative–developers outside of Bitcoin Core releasing a client–could be more dramatic. 

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