An open letter to the Bitcoin community

Editor’s note: More than 30 Bitcoin Core developers and contributors have jointly signed an open letter to the Bitcoin community on how to reach a technical consensus on Bitcoin expansion.

The signatories on the list include current Bitcoin Core maintainer Wladimir van der Laan, Blockstream co-founder Pieter Wuille, Treechain developer Peter Todd, and Litecoin creator Charlie Lee. Bitcoin Core maintainer Gavin Andresen and bitcoinJ developer Mike Hearn do not appear on the list.

As active contributors to Bitcoin, we share this open letter to convey our action plan for technical consensus and Bitcoin scaling.

Bitcoin is many things to many people. However, the development and maintenance of Bitcoin requires the efforts of everyone, Satoshi Nakamoto also sought the review and cooperation, and then the hard work of Bitcoin developers, making the Bitcoin system more secure and several orders of magnitude faster. The Bitcoin developer community is invested in the future of Bitcoin, responsible for the health of the network, striving for the highest performance standards, and working hard to keep Bitcoin safe.

We are committed to building Bitcoin and responding to the needs of the community. In the past five years, we have written code and released more than 50 versions of the client, reviewed more than 45 formal proposals, and improved Bitcoin's performance, security, and scalability. Sometimes technical discussions can be very intense, but all of this is to improve Bitcoin.

Most of these improvements have already been made, with substantial improvements in CPU bottlenecks, memory usage, network efficiency, initial block download time, and algorithm scaling. However, several key challenges remain, each requiring tradeoffs to be considered and evaluated. We have debated the issue of Bitcoin scaling for several years, while also maintaining the core characteristics of the network, such as decentralization, security, and permissionless innovation. We are committed to ensuring that as many users as possible can benefit from Bitcoin without undermining these fundamental values.

There will always be arguments, but Bitcoin is a multi-billion dollar system, and a single mistake could damage the system. To mitigate potential risks, it is necessary to take the time to evaluate the proposed proposals and find the best solution through consensus.

In the coming months, there will be two public workshops that will allow everyone to come together to discuss these issues. The first Bitcoin Scaling Workshop will be held in Montreal on 9月12－9月13日. The second workshop is planned to be held in Hong Kong on December 6-7, and this time, it will include users from more global regions.

We ask the community not to prejudge, but to work collaboratively to reach the best solution through existing processes and supporting workshops.

We believe that by working together we can reach consensus on the best path forward. We believe this is the direction for Bitcoin moving forward and strengthens the existing Bitcoin development community review process.

We welcome your participation as we continue to work together to bring Bitcoin into the future.

sign:

Wladimir J. van der Laan

Pieter Wuille

Cory Fields

Luke Dashjr

Jonas Schnelli

Jorge Timón

Greg Maxwell

Eric Voskuil

Amir Taaki

Dave Collins

Michael Ford

Peter Todd

Phillip Mienk

Suhas Daftuar

R.E. Broadley

Eric Lombrozo

Daniel Kraft

Chris Moore

Alex Morcos

dexX7

Warren Togami

Mark Friedenbach

Ross Nicoll

Pavel Janík

Josh Lehan

Andrew Poelstra

Christian Decker

Bryan Bishop

Benedict Chan

฿tcDrak

Charlie Lee

Jeremy Rubin

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