Appreciate your input.

On the last part, that illustrates a big difference in perspective - while I totally get that you could read his post as a criticism of various Core devs for 'blocking' or similar, I didn't read it like that; I feel like he's mostly describing that the dynamics don't allow consensus to be reached.

It's all hard to define but I don't see how we're going to get to the kind of consensus you're describing or looking for.

As a concrete-ish example, take op_ctv, how much of the nonconsensus is 'we're not at all ready to say a different version of this idea isn't better?'. How much weight is given to the philosophical perspective of those who don't even *want* covenants? I have no idea how to do that, or if I should want to. Overall the bar just seems insanely  high for any *meaningful* soft fork change.

I'm speaking as an outsider mostly of course, so my opinion on these things needs a big caveat. 

 The dynamic he’s describing (where you have to convince “Core”) strikes me as an incredibly weird way of viewing it, though - it’s just a group of developers working on one project. I don’t really understand this perspective at all, tbh.

In terms of “well why didn’t CTV happen”, I responded on Twitter, but there’s nontrivial risk to the act of doing a fork in Bitcoin. That has to be weighed against the value of any fork. For me personally, I didn’t see a single use for CTV that was even remotely compelling (not like I wouldn’t use it, but I don’t think anyone will use it) until Timeout Trees, at which point every has given up on CTV.

I don’t think “well clearly we’re just not getting anything” is the right way to look at it. From where I sit, the attempts at adding covenant features to Bitcoin have been half-assed at best. 

 Everything that uses pre-signed transactions gets improved with CTV. There is nothing complex in understanding this part.

Personally, I would use joinpool: https://gist.github.com/harding/a30864d0315a0cebd7de3732f5bd88f0

I have experimented with the idea on signet and it improves coinjoin. 

 Most things that use pre-signed transactions want to update them (eg lightning), which doesn’t work with CTV. 

 yes

the kind of Mike Hearn era divisive "you should be more of a dictator" "no, not like that, you're doing it wrong, you're useless, stupid" "go away, you have too much power" abusive shit is something that took me years to heal from

you can pay no one (who is able) enough to be "CEO of bitcoin", take all the legal and political and personal reputational risk, and it's something that shouldn't exist anyway, aren't we trying to do things differently?

i hope none of the current maintainers experiences it like that, but it's always kind of awful too see this kind of discourse coming back 

 I wonder if part of the problem is that he starts the post with the phrase "leadership problem". I just glided past that and read the rest, and I saw it as a framing of "we really may no longer be in a position to do this kind of thing". Whereas if you read his whole post as about a leadership problem, then anyone directly involved in Core dev could very reasonably take it as saying the kind of thing you mention here, and I have to entirely agree that that is between unhelpful and also really, really bad. Like I said to Matt, could be a perspective thing; and seeing some of the more heated exchanges going on over there, well, I can see that this is not super-productive ... 

 It's nice that you bring an outside, detached perspective. I'll ponder this a bit more.

One thing that was absent in the article are the crypto tricks some people are researching again with batching, aggregation, entroot, etc. As far as I can tell that is pretty much only pushed forward by core-adjacent people at the moment. The consensus cleanup is also making some progress. 

 i definitely agree with the part that making consensus changes has become more difficult !

i just think the framing as a bitcoin core leadership issue is way too simplistic, and i hate how he waves away all the current work done on the node software because it's not consensus changes, that's also typical 2014 playbook

sorry if i overreacted, if...anything this reminds me that i shouldn't ever get involved in this stuff again and stick to code reviews 🙂