In this interview, I talk to Shinobi, the host of Block Digest. We discuss making changes to the Bitcoin protocol, hard vs soft forks, ossification, and the upcoming Taproot soft fork means for Bitcoin.

SHOW NOTES:
https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/bitcoin-tech-5-bitcoin-consensus

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TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Introduction
0:48 Consensus changes in Bitcoin
3:55 What is a node?
8:47 Blockchains and Splits
11:54 Block Rewards and Incentives
24:39 More on Chain Splits
26:59 Block Size Wars
28:48 Orphan Blocks
31:15 Confirmations
34:25 Upgrading the Network
38:00 Rough Consensus with Segwit
42:33 Coordinating Change
43:59 Soft Forks & Hard Forks
48:14 User Activated Soft Fork (UASF)
49:03 Bitcoin Uses Soft Forks
55:24 Taproot Activation
57:57 Ossification
1:01:21 What is a BIP?
1:03:56 Why Taproot Matters
1:09:39 Malicious forks
1:11:40 Elon & the Mining Council
1:20:30 How should we Respond?

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****

“I cannot stress this enough; when you are trying to gauge consensus for an upgrade proposal, it is not a democracy. Absolutely not. It is not voting; it is not majority wins. That is not how things are done.”
— Shinobi

Location: Miami
Date: Tuesday 25th May
Project: Block Digest
Role: Host

Bitcoin is an entirely decentralised network, and as such, by definition, it has no authoritative organisation to dictate or coordinate rule changes. Instead, any improvements or changes must be community-driven.

Changes to Bitcoin are rare, and when the developers propose protocol changes, they go through a strenuous review and test process. As such, changes are rare and slow to happen. While some see this as a negative, it is one of the strengths of Bitcoin.

A monetary network that is worth nearly $1tn should not be fast or easy to change. Many even think that eventually, the base-layer of Bitcoin may reach a point where it must no longer implement any changes, and further improvements would occur on higher layers.

In this interview, I talk to Shinobi, the host of Block Digest. We discuss making changes to the Bitcoin protocol, hard vs soft forks, ossification, and the upcoming Taproot soft fork means for Bitcoin.