Ossification vs. Funding on Bitcoin
False dichotomies and the Bitshevik threat
I came across a lot of “unsolicited advice” on my Twitter timeline from laser-eyed Bitcoiners and the usual crypto-anon accounts talking about the latest controversial topic: Funding and ossification. There is a lot to untangle here, from the likely made-up rumor that started this whole discussion, to the concepts thrown around in the most polemic and confused ways, and some practical history from the Bitcoin ABC team, who tackled both “ossification” and funding over the last years.
It’s Bitsheviks all the way down
Remarkably enough, a sizable amount of these posts I came across converged around the idea of completely disagreeing with funding Bitcoin’s infrastructure engineers. And this notion is not even about the how of the funding approach but takes offense at the mere notion of funding core devs in general, of course, because of “centralization” concerns.
We had people like that within the Bitcoin Cash community when our protocol-funding mechanism was discussed. To this day, many of these folks fall into the trap of slapping the “centralized” label on anything that isn’t built around a web2-forum democracy and politics, overly noisy public statements, or cheap votes: The Bitshevik. Whatever you do, just don’t anger them with a roadmap!
Anyway for purposes of this article I will refrain from using this word and simply call them “confused purists”.
It turns out, though to little surprise to me, that within both BTC and BCH communities, a ton of people suffer from the same false sense of decentralization purism and a confused application of all sorts of economic, technical, or political concepts onto a decentralized project that simply don’t fit the bill. But since there are multiple things to untangle before I can make the shoe fit again, I have to start with a brief rundown of the recent events that have unfolded in Bitcoin maxi-land.
So what happened?
A few days ago some dude called “Odell”, apparently known in the Bitcoin space stated on NOSTR that Michael Saylor somehow aggressively pressured Bitcoin-centric VCs to stop their plans of donating some of their Bitcoin ETF profits back into the network’s infrastructure development. Note that the plans in question are explicit in doing this in the form of unconditional donations, with no strings attached whatsoever.
First of all, yeah I get it. “VC” and “funding” in the same sentence rings all sorts of alarm bells, especially within these purist types, and for good reason. Concerning Bitcoin BTC, however, my remarks are two-fold:
- Blockstream, a highly influential Bitcoin development team is already VC-funded, leaving room for concerns of capture. However, such concerns were raised years ago already and to this day no Bitcoiner seems to take issue with this fact. Those who dare to ask simple questions about that are ridiculed of course.
- At the same time though, explicitly unconditional donations from some upstart Bitcoin-VC firms somehow is a centralization factor for most right off the bat. Exhibits on that will come later…
My point simply put: both of these ideas do not fit together, hinting neatly at the purist-induced confusion within the narratives and opinions in the Bitcoin space we keep seeing these days.
The Motive
But it is worse, there is, unfortunately, more untangling to do. Now, since this rumor was started, partly denied by the people in question and partly still waiting to be fully debunked, I since concluded for myself that it has no basis in reality. My reasoning for that is, that it makes no sense to me as to why Saylor would even do any of that. For the simple fact that it goes against all that he promotes.
VCs, be they shady like Blockstream’s bankster-type handlers, or more benign like the Vandeck’s unconditional pledges, are completely in line with “Bitcoin Saylor Vision”. Don’t forget that Saylor may have a pretty ignorant, but fairly straightforward and at least consistent idea of what Bitcoin is:
It is digital gold, even better, digital real estate! It is meant to be a frictionless speculative asset for people to play around with, who usually buy property to store their wealth. As that, it is meant to
- Retain its value proposition to give investors a sense of security. Ignoring the fact that it had to break the promise of its original unstoppable cash proposition to do so.
- Get taken up and cared for by “grown up”, aka regulated, professional, financial institutions going forward.
VCs that unconditionally fund the current purist, maximalist, and pro-ossification developers are perfectly in line with what he wants to achieve and explicitly promotes. This is why I think it’s a complete fabrication. But either way, something is interesting about this whole event.
First of all, it’s concerning that I — who does not closely follow Saylor’s ramblings and grotesque analogies — have a better idea of his alignment and positioning, than his laser-eyed following. But secondly, do you know how we can make this shoe fit again? For that, you just have to look at all of this through the confused purist mindset.
Odell, the crypto-bro who I guess tried to bait BCH people for some giggles — or whatever his reason for his ALL CAPS UNBACKED RUMOR POST may have been, I really don’t know and don’t care enough to investigate — probably unintentionally kicked off a cacophony of purist clangor both from outside and from within his ranks.
It couldn’t come at a better time by the way, with more people waking up to the possibility that Bitcoin with its technical constraints is probably “not gonna make it” or that “bcasher’s were right” after all when they were claiming Bitcoin took a turn in 2017 leaving people with concerns of stagnation, capture, and ultimately a failure to deliver on its “second layer” promises. But this will hardly reach the purist, as he has no overview of the issue at hand.
The ignorance I am lamenting goes all the way down to Odell himself who unwillingly outs himself as a run-of-the-mill purist as well, not being able to come up with a minimally consistent narrative of a capture attempt. One that would actually make sense to be discussed and opinionated on and that would correctly portray Saylor’s incentives and values. The story was derailed by the author itself from the get-go and the wider sphere took it from there into 8 different directions. This leads us right to today's entangled mess of a discourse that is about “ossification vs. funding”.
What’s ossification on Bitcoin, anyway?
Now that the funding part has been untangled and the rumor has been put into place, I am happy to address the two concepts (funding & ossification) mentioned, by removing the false dichotomy between them.
First of all, let’s just explain in simplest terms what we mean by ossification. As far as I can tell ossification is a technical term that refers to a state that you as a software project actually do not want to end up at.
Ossification is what happens if you let’s say don’t have good development practices and even worse, are successful with what you’ve built to the point that you cannot change the code, upgrade, or fix anything without disrupting the network and breaking things for everyone else. Like a calcified bone, it is immovable, prone to shatter, and too late to fix, leaving an overall stagnation of the project as a whole.
Now some smart bro in Bitcoin it seems somehow took this concept and applied it with a whole other meaning to Bitcoin’s protocol development strategy. The idea is now that ossification is something ideal that you would want. However, only in the sense of “not meddling with the protocol”, which in itself is fairly reasonable, to begin with, apart from using “ossification” to describe that. Or misrepresenting any approach that is actually aligned with keeping the protocol safe as a bad form of “tinkering”.
I am not sure, maybe there was never a word for that and ossification is just unduly suitable — at least if you either don’t know or ignore its original meaning to bear with the argument.
So far so good, we ended up at the value proposition of Bitcoin again. As in no changes are allowed, so we can all be certain what BTC looks like 50 years from now on. Don’t sweat, it will be the same unusable, ossified, broken base layer, but at least you can rest assured that it will be that and nothing else, kudos.
This ossification-strategy would be like say the technical approach to achieving this investor’s reassurance, which especially Bitcoin for obvious reasons has to cater to since it can’t be much of anything else.
Funding vs Ossification? Please make sense.
Now what has this ossification thing to do with funding? Well, as the false dichotomy that it is, it has nothing to do with each other. Why does this dichotomy exist though and why does everyone run around headlessly since Odell’s post to argue for either one side or the other, with just a few occasional nuanced voices that get drowned out in the noise?
Well, this is where the purists come in again. As confused as always, they took it on to themselves to create a whole discord about this dichotomy, trying to justify Saylor’s alleged “attack” on Vaneck’s donation pledge. They did not try to make sense of why Saylor would do that and did not doubt the message, because, in their purist mind, it makes perfect sense:
VC? Funding? The one thing that is worse than having a roadmap!? SAY NO MORE: CAPTURED! (I hope people realize the similarities to purists on the BCH side who keep saying BTC is “hijacked”, only that they at least have some arguments to stand on.
Only a few people were smart enough to withhold their judgment until more info comes out (which apparently still hasn’t). Others, like me, would try to make sense of it and soon conclude that it is simply nonsense because it made no sense to begin with.
While people who would already doubt BTC and the laser-eyed cult surrounding it concluded virtually anything imaginable up to complete capture, the people who would sell their grandma for Bitcoin (or a signed copy of Saylor’s cyber-hornet quote) would immediately jump to justify why it is correct and a smart 4D chess move of Saylor that he did what he (allegedly) did. Yes, BTC fanbois reached Q-anon, trust the process-level mindset. Their ossification is long complete.
Oh right, speaking of ossification, since these types do not have anything other than that both culturally and technologically (and still are confused purists like almost everyone else on either side of the debate), they snappily came up with phenomenal mental gymnastics to conclude that it is completely the right thing to do of Saylor to attack Vaneck’s donation plans because “the base layer needs to be ossified!”, creating the completely nonsensical notion that funding somehow would go against that.
Don’t get me wrong, I do understand that non-engineers would not know about all that. I didn’t know about anything regarding software development either before learning the hard way. Unfortunately, though, I also witnessed seasoned developers and engineers making this claim. Quite shocking actually.
Anyway, to untangle one last time, the deal here is that even if we want to be complete decentralization purists and ossification maximalists, you still have to maintain the code if nothing else. If you would deem BTC perfect as is and that it is much more important to not change to not risk breaking it, then you would still have to churn out version after version of newly found bug fixes or updated dependencies and so on. I won’t go deeper into that here, but I address this issue in a sidenote in this Avalanche post [1]
So, you will still need engineers. Highly skilled, important, and rather rare ones at that. They could work for Google, Amazon, or Facebook for salaries most of us will never see. Instead, they chose to slave away on open-source software and are being constantly eyed, doubted, and accused, even though they are the only staff on this giant, deadly deep-sea expedition ship that does the work in the engine rooms, while everyone else is sipping and zapping martinis on the deck. Bitsheviks do be like that.
https://twitter.com/SimplyBitcoinTV/status/1778265784109703455
Note that types like Maller are not completely deluded like the run-of-the-mill purist, having at least a consistent view of how Bitcoin should work, and posting a fairly sensible take (on funding at least). He is still a hopeless purist and a maxi at heart, but at least he is not throwing a bunch of concepts together into some bullshit bingo conclusion.
He simply tries to explain, probably coming from his professional experience in the web2 and crypto-industry, that funding needs to happen one way or the other. He wants “the community” to do this, which is yet another purist-tainted issue with completely unorganized and “community-driven” projects and funding, but I untangle that one maybe another time.
Let’s just attest that he is in alignment with BTC’s current value proposition coming from a purist, small blocker, community-driven angle and that he sees no issue with the way Vaneck and others want to fund open-source development, as long as it is completely unconditional.
It might even be naive to think unconditional pledges from VC are even possible, but I have yet to see someone making a case against it on those lines, everyone else chose to speak out against funding per se. This deeply rooted, completely out-of-place anti-trust sentiment that Maller can’t even believe he is hearing is exactly what drives the confused purist. If you want community-run, donation-based, no leaders, no governance, ossification, and whatnot, good luck with the circus and enjoy while it lasts because it won’t last long.
eCash fixes this
Lastly, I untangled all this mess for you because I wanted to end up with my last note which is related and is happening right now on our Bitcoin ABC network, which is more commonly known as eCash.
I think it is fair to say that all this “secure base layer” stuff combined with “innovation” on second layers and sidechains that don’t disrupt or bloat the protocol is highly idealized, often mentioned, but never actually delivered promise of the BTC project and its leadership. According to Mallers and the purists, there are no leaders in Bitcoin, so that may have something to do with it.
Ironically, Bitcoin ABC’s strategy in tackling the funding issue with a simple miner policy, going forward according to their roadmap and integrating Avalanche on eCash delivers on BTCs broken promises by allowing innovation and any needed protocols to work independently of the base layer in the form of simple policies or subnets.
It’s essentially a Bitcoin maxi wet dream. This is what you get if you have your eyes on the ball and simply know what you are doing, having a reasonable roadmap to work on instead of polemics, handwaving, or publicity stunts.
And yes, the Bitcoin ABC’s principled but fast-moving approach is even more tedious to coordinate, and it may be contentious especially if you happen to amass a confused purist following which is all but rare in Bitcoin and crypto. But it is well worth it and looking at it, a sane way forward. For eCash and by extension for the Bitcoin project as a whole.
It was the iterative approach, the focus on the roadmap, the challenging bi-yearly hard-fork upgrades, and the willingness to integrate groundbreaking technology like Avalanche with our core protocol that allowed Bitcoin ABC to realize this ideal system. One with the most complete security model of all Bitcoin implementations.
https://twitter.com/eCashCommunity/status/1778350385737994272
A protocol-funded high-throughput, low-fee cryptocurrency with a secure base layer that allows for fast-moving innovation. Making the network interoperable, agile, and easy to upgrade without the need to “tinker with the protocol”.
Thanks for reading!
— Koush
