ProductionReady

ProductionReady is a 501(c)(3) public charity advancing open-source Bitcoin development through education and funding for a new conservative Bitcoin client.

[ProductionReady @ProductionReady]

We’re excited to officially announce @ProductionReady, a 501(c)(3) public charity established by @Excellion, @jimmysong, @parkeralewis, and @jratcliff to advance open-source Bitcoin development through education and funding for a new conservative Bitcoin client.

[Jimmy Song (송재준) @jimmysong]

Trust only works if there are sufficient negative consequences for breaking trust.

With money, there's almost no negative consequences for those that betray our trust. It seems many other aspects of trust are being violated without much negative consequence either.

[Jimmy Song (송재준) @jimmysong]

Fiat money interferes with reality by removing consequences, at least in the short term.

[Samson Mow @Excellion]

Some people (like @adam3us) disagreed with my point that the BIP-110 ordeal could have been avoided if OP_RETURN was left alone for a while.

Some also pointed out that Core doesn't need to do anything the users/plebs want. That is true! Bitcoin Core is not Bitcoin, and the Core team/project can do what they choose.

Only it's a bit more complicated than that.

Let's address the first point. The following was my reply to @ToneVays:

--

It was at a time when there were so many suspicious looking missteps on the Core side.

- Banning people from GitHub
- Locking thread and unlocking to ninja ACK (still no good explanation of this)
- Citrea being cited as a reason for change
- Antoine asking Peter to open the PR for him (sure he had a reason but optics looked bad in light of the situation)
- Distributed Authoritarianism
- Questions over the legitimacy of an appointed maintainer (and the already prevalent confusion about how maintainer roles work and IETF-like process)

List goes on. It was a pile of tinder waiting to go up in flames.

--

The next point is that most people did use Core, so they viewed it as theirs. Core is and isn't theirs at the same time - if that makes sense.

There's actually a parallel in game dev. When balancing a game (RTS or MMO), you have to be very careful because everyone gets attached to the various unit stats and abilities. There were times working on COH and DOW that we would buff almost everything else rather than nerf one thing, because we knew how passionate and angry the players could be when they perceive something to be "taken away" from them.

Interestingly enough there's a direct example from @VitalikButerin:

"One day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit. In 2011, searching for a new purpose in life, I discovered Bitcoin."

Also, as I have said before, Bitcoiners do not like being told what to do or forced to just accept things. For the average non-technical user, the OP_RETURN change was tantamount to a consensus change or an attack on Bitcoin because they didn't understand how it all worked exactly, didn't know how to change their config, and were angry at the amount of spam on the chain.

So Core has no obligation to listen to the users, and that's fine, but they should not expect the users to not get angry when they perceive their Bitcoin/money to be under attack.

Worth repeating my view that devs should probably operate under nyms and be more low-key like Satoshi.

[Samson Mow @Excellion]

Many things in this post are incorrect, and it matters that we correct them, because this version of the history is exactly what convinced people the last few months were a good idea.

“BIP-148 is celebrated as Bitcoin Independence Day, because it proved that ordinary users, running nodes in their homes, could force the most powerful mining cartels and corporations in the industry to back down. The users had no hashrate, no exchanges, no lobbyists. They had conviction and they had nodes, and that was enough.”

First, the framing. August 1st is what's celebrated as Bitcoin Independence Day (I coined and popularized that term). August 1st was the flag day, and it commemorates the outcome the UASF threat produced, not BIP-148 itself.

Second, BIP-148 was not just "ordinary users" running nodes at home. It was a cross section of the entire Bitcoin network, something a lot of BIP-110 supporters seem to disregard: developers, exchanges, wallets, miners, and mega whales, alongside ordinary users.

Most important to understand is that BIP-148 and the small block camp carried a massive amount of economic weight. Chain split markets ran on @bitfinex through 2017, and outside of those markets I know of many OTC deals struck privately in whale groups to trade one side of a split against the other. There was skin in the game on both sides of the war, and huge amounts of BTC put on the line to show real conviction. This was as much an economic war as an ideological one, and that point is rarely acknowledged.

Even the companies backing BIP-148 were taking real risk. BIP-148 was never merged into Bitcoin Core. Running it meant deliberately installing different software and accepting that if the UASF chain lost, you could be reorganized off the chain entirely. Bitmain spelled that scenario out themselves, calling it a wipe out, in the same post where they laid out their hard fork contingency. Dozens of companies committed anyway (BIP-110 supporters would likely call them suitcoiners today).

On the topic of hashrate, BIP-148 had no version bit of its own. It required bit 1, which was BIP-141. So the accurate way to state it is that BIP-148/BIP-141 had 30-45% of hashrate behind it for most of its deployment window. During that time I was COO of BTCC, overseeing a mining pool that was the biggest one signaling SegWit.

So the UASF threat had three components that made it credible: economic weight, hashrate, and nodes. BIP-110 only had nodes. That is UASF cosplay, not a real UASF.

Another point to cover: Mechanic was spreading misinformation in Spaces (and likely other places) that BIP-148, a UASF, activated SegWit. That is false. It was technically BIP-91 that brought miners in line with BIP-141. BIP-148 was effectively frontrun and never had to be tested. So Bitcoin Independence Day, while celebrating the flag day deadline, is as much a celebration of BIP-91 as it is of BIP-148.

So no, it was not just nodes and conviction.

Just think about things rationally for a minute. Why would buying a node-in-a-box give you the right to dictate what anyone else on the network does, regardless of whether it's a miner or another user? Does buying two nodes-in-a-box give you that power? Of course not. Btw the whole plug-and-play node culture came after the Blocksize War. In 2015-2017 you just downloaded the software and ran it on your computer.

Stay humble and stack sats, but also stay humble when people who lived through the history try to explain it to you.

[Samson Mow @Excellion]

If you don't take responsibility for your own hand in directly spawning the BIP-110 movement, it will just happen again. Maybe you can't see it, but your "side" was just as nasty in its attacks, especially given you and other Core devs' close association with angry vitriol-spewing people like Brian from Bitcoin Magazine. Did you really not expect that anger and vitriol to be returned tenfold? All of it amplified by the Zhao/Newberry improprieties and a long list of other clumsy, guilty-looking missteps.

All I did was hint at structural problems within Core, problems Jon Atack later discussed openly. Nothing I said was inaccurate, much less libel.

This entire mess could have been avoided if you had just left OP_RETURN alone for a year or two until things cooled off. Everyone knew it was only a default, which is exactly the point: changing it or not changing it made no practical difference.

BIP-110 supporters were largely not technical. They were ordinary people, artists, podcasters, musicians, your average Bitcoiner, and they perceived a threat to Bitcoin, which is to say a threat to their money. You don't need a deep understanding of human psychology to grok why that was going to cause an uproar.

You may be a great coder, but you have no self-awareness and no EQ.

Also, if I just went whichever way the wind blows, the Big Blockers likely would have won the Blocksize War.

[JAN3 @JAN3com]

Samson Mow was right!

As the mandatory signaling window opened at block 961,632, BIP-110 played out exactly as @Excellion predicted on @simplybitcoin. With virtually zero support from miners, exchanges, or wallets, the breakaway attempt stalled after just two blocks.

[ProductionReady @ProductionReady]

@CobraBcash @Arthur_van_Pelt @secsovereign 👇

[Samson Mow @Excellion]

We had a call 2 weeks ago and decided to wait until after 110 forked off and then would resume fundraising. We have a fair amount raised but as BTC price went down, we need more to extend the runway to provide stability for devs we fund. Either way, the agreement in the group was that all air in the room was being sucked out by 110 (and then the vulns) so we should wait a bit and let people get over fork (and alt Bitcoin client) fatigue.

@ProductionReady is meant to be for the long run, not a quick fix.

[Samson Mow @Excellion]

We had a call 2 weeks ago and decided to wait until after 110 forked off and then would resume fundraising. We have a fair amount raised but as BTC price went down, we need more to extend the runway to provide stability for devs we fund. Either way, the agreement in the group was that all air in the room was being sucked out by 110 (and then the vulns) so we should wait a bit and let people get over fork (and alt Bitcoin client) fatigue.

@ProductionReady is meant to be for the long run, not a quick fix.

[Jimmy Song (송재준) @jimmysong]

Whether it was malice or incompetence doesn't ultimately matter. Both are attack surfaces of trust and minimizing that is the whole game.

[Samson Mow @Excellion]

I'm currently being accused of flipping sides or contradicting myself. I choose my words carefully, but it seems that is lost on most people. So, let me break it down. 👇🧵

➡️ I hate spam and Ordinals garbage.
➡️ I support efforts to limit spam even if it is a cat-and-mouse game.
➡️ Spam is a nuisance, not existential. Fees and block size limit the damage.
➡️ It is certainly not a reason to push contentious consensus rules through in a rush.
➡️ My opinion is Core should not have removed the OP_RETURN limit.
➡️ The OP_RETURN limit is policy and not a consensus rule, so it didn't matter if they removed it or left it alone. They should have left it alone, but that is just my opinion.
➡️ I cannot force Core to do anything, and they have no obligation to do anything I would like them to do. I can voice my opinion on what they are doing, but it is ultimately their project and they can do what they want.
➡️ If I want something changed, I have to either develop my own version of Core or fund developers to work on what I want done.
➡️ There are people in Core, and closely associated with Core, who said a lot of stupid things that did not help their cause.
➡️ Even if some devs said stupid things, they cannot sneak changes into the code to destroy Bitcoin.
➡️ There are structural problems and a risk of groupthink in the Core organization.
➡️ Even if the process to select maintainers is flawed, maintainers can't unilaterally do anything.
➡️ It's good that Gloria stepped down, given the situation around how she was appointed as maintainer (this one will probably upset the Core white knights).
➡️ Those who defended Core without acknowledging behavioral issues of some individuals, contributed to the divide and helped foment mistrust among those who don't fully understand the IETF-like process.
➡️ There are a lot of very talented and good developers in Core who just work quietly without drama.
➡️ We absolutely need skilled developers working on maintaining and securing the Bitcoin codebase. Bitcoin is a very complex piece of software that needs a lot of eyes reviewing and testing all changes.
➡️ I believe we should move towards ossification, but ossification does not mean you just stop all development. Security is a moving target that needs constant resources to maintain.
➡️ I never supported BIP110. BIP110 is not a serious or viable proposal.

I assumed that people could pick up on nuance and that there are common-sense things that don't need to be said, but I'm seeing that isn't the case.

If you're quoting things I posted before and framing them as a "gotcha," or evidence to put me on trial for "betraying BIP110," you're only showing your own ignorance of the subject matter.

[JAN3 @JAN3com]

A small group on X shouldn't be deciding on changes to Bitcoin's consensus rules. If BIP-110 activates this way, what stops the next group from doing the same thing?

@Excellion explained his thought process on @BitcoinToday__. 🔥

[Jimmy Song (송재준) @jimmysong]

https://t.co/cFmFgRT6cm

[Lyn Alden @LynAldenContact]

Some proponents of making Bitcoin more programmable said the same thing when I wasn’t in support of their quick fork attempt either. And similarly, it wasn’t that I opposed the tech in principle; it just didn’t meet my threshold for supporting it.

I’m a consensus conservative; it takes a lot to get me to agree to a change. One of my favorite features of Bitcoin is how resistant it is to change, including to some of the changes I’d personally like to see.

But talk aside, I support action. Happy to let the market decide in August. If I wasn’t asked about it on a podcast, I just would’ve carried on saying nothing and let action do its thing.👍

[Samson Mow @Excellion]

https://t.co/58JuiSylSq

[Jimmy Song (송재준) @jimmysong]

The worst part of these fights is how personal it gets.

But then Bitcoin shouldn't be about individuals anyway.

[Jimmy Song (송재준) @jimmysong]

Once you lose someone's trust you're not going to get that trust back without at least some mea culpa.

For me that's the big lesson of what has happened with OP_RETURN.

[Jimmy Song (송재준) @jimmysong]

https://t.co/vzJHwR8z1X

[Аnja Dragovic ⚡ @BitcoinAnja]

What if the biggest risks to Bitcoin aren’t what you think? 🤔

I am super proud of this episode, and it was one I initially shied away from.

I sat down with Bitcoin expert @jimmysong to dig into Bitcoin Core, Knots, and ProductionReady, and what this emerging split in node software could mean for Bitcoin’s future.

We get into the trade-offs, the tensions, and why just running Bitcoin is becoming a more loaded statement than most people realise.

This conversation genuinely changed how I think about the network.

Tag someone who needs to hear this.

Full episode https://t.co/1zyYBLS7Wu

[Jimmy Song (송재준) @jimmysong]

Centralization is a natural end-state of networked systems.

That's why decentralization is so hard.

[Brian HoonJong Paik @brianhoonjong]

Had the absolute honor of interviewing @jimmysong at the Las Vegas Bitcoin Conference. He’s the teacher who first opened my eyes to how "Fiat Ruins Everything."

Jimmy, along with @Excellion, @parkeralewis, and @jratcliff, is launching @ProductionReady—the 3rd major Bitcoin node software alongside Core and Knots. Client diversity is absolutely crucial for protecting Bitcoin’s decentralization and security.

Fully support this conservative, security-first approach to building on Bitcoin. If you're a dev, they are hiring!