Yesterday (February 2nd) we held a relatively unstructured meeting on Taproot activation on IRC which was open to all.
The conversation log is here: http://gnusha.org/taproot-activation/2021-02-02.log
The meeting was previously announced here: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-January/018370.html
I will summarize what was discussed as best I can. Please revert to the conversation log if you have the time as any summary is going to be imperfect. Any errors or biases are my own and corrections will be gratefully accepted.
I’ll start with Rusty Russell’s takeaways (many thanks to our Asia Pacific representatives for joining in the middle of the night by the way) on Mastodon:
1. Unanimous support for BIP 8. RIP BIP 9.
2. Overwhelming consensus that 1 year is the correct timeout value (it’s actually defined in blocks, so 26x2016 or maybe 87600).
3. Majority consensus for lockinontimeout false, though Luke Dashjr strongly opposed.
4. No decision I could see on start time, but 2 months was done for SegWit and that didn’t seem too objectionable.
https://bitcoinhackers.org/@rusty/105664386728806153
I personally think this is a solid summary though I do want to point out it wasn’t only Luke that opposed lockinontimeout=false. There were other individuals who also opposed lockinontimeout=false but at least from my reading that was the minority opinion. Luke concluded there wasn’t clear consensus on it and that even if lockinontimeout=false was eventually chosen as a Bitcoin Core default he would be running lockinontimeout=true on his node.
In terms of the PRs, the following BIP 8 PRs were merged following the meeting.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1020
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1021
The latter was merged due to an observation from Jonas Nick in the PR comments and during the meeting that without it nodes could end up on the wrong chain in a scenario where they run lockinontimeout=true with most nodes running lockinontimeout=false.
The Bitcoin Core PR #19573 requires additional work from its author and further review before it can be considered for merging.
I do want to thank the large number of participants for engaging in the discussion in the spirit of wanting to make progress on Taproot activation and for gracefully allowing me to interrupt them and keep the discussion on topic. The vast majority of the time this level of bluntness (and pushing away slightly off topic questions) is not desired or required in Bitcoin technical meetings. I hope those who were interrupted during this meeting will return and ask their questions now a meeting of that sheer size is over.
We are in the process of attempting to organize a follow up more closely following the format of John Newbery’s Bitcoin Core PR review club which will be lower level, technical and focused on the Bitcoin Core PR #19573. The Bitcoin Core PR review club is also open to all but given its more technical nature it shouldn’t present the same challenges as yesterday’s meeting.
Thanks to Alejandro De La Torre for providing an update on his website (taprootactivation.com) following the meeting. Chun Wang (co-founder of F2Pool, ~ 16 percent of global hash rate) has decided to support BIP 8(false,1 year).