The bitcoiners gathered at OP_Next were decidedly in favor of progress – but not too much progress, and certainly not too fast.
BOSTON –– Most of the world focuses on bitcoin (BTC)’s zipping price. Not so for the 100-odd bitcoiners who gathered at Fidelity Investments’ headquarters over the weekend.
They were preoccupied with helping the original cryptocurrency conquer the world – and meantime avoid getting wrecked.
“This is about getting bitcoin to the next billion people,” said Will Foxley, emcee of OP_NEXT, what he claimed was the first bitcoin scaling conference in five years.
OP_NEXT is the newest anomaly on crypto’s overstuffed conference circuit. It's got none of the retail-friendly bravado of Bitcoin Nashville. It lacks the corporate booths that dot ETH Denver. Few of its speakers shilled their crypto-business ventures, as nearly everyone did at Solana’s rebooted Breakpoint.
Instead, dozens of hoodie-wearing coder boys (and a handful of women) debated improvements that might make bitcoin more useful, usable, and even resilient against faraway problems that could one day upend the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency.
“Either we aggressively pursue innovation and progress as quickly as possible or we will eventually be replaced,” said Paul Sztorc of bitcoin developer company Layer2 Labs.
Bitcoin famously lacks a singular decision-making authority. Proposed upgrades need to find consensus among the community's many stakeholders, and eventually adoption by the miners who run the computers that run the blockchain. No one quite knows how to know when consensus is reached.
“I know it when I see it,” quipped Colin Harper, the conference host as Blockspace Media’s editor-in-chief (he and Foxley are former CoinDesk reporters).
Soft forks
The two most recent soft forks, or backward-compatible upgrades, helped bitcoin move beyond simply shifting “digital gold” between wallets. Nowadays, network transactions are filled with primitive versions of the wacky crypto-financial wizardry pioneered on Ethereum and other smart contract-centric blockchains. Future soft forks could give this kind of innovation a boost.
While many developers regularly propose upgrades, none have succeeded since Taproot was activated in 2021, and Segwit in 2017 before it. Ossification is starting to set in to Bitcoin Core (the basic open-source software for wallets and nodes), some attendees said. Can bitcoin continue to evolve? Technically, of course. But should it?
”People got scared about soft forks unnecessarily because the last two soft forks were large,” said Brandon Black, engineering manager at Swan Bitcoin, a brokerage and custodian. “We should get in the habit” of improving bitcoin.
OP_Next attendees were decidedly in favor of progress – but not too much progress, and certainly not too fast. When one audience member shouted support for pushing regular software upgrades to Bitcoin Core, an entire panel of bitcoin developers scoffed. One jokingly retorted, “soft forks every day!”
Proposed soft forks percolate up from the bitcoiner community. They undergo study and debate, and if they find sufficient interest, get a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) number. From there, they face more debates, security reviews, debates, and also debates. BIPs that win community consensus (whatever that means) must then be activated as a soft fork – a mechanism that itself is up for debate.
