0:00Richard Greaser Hey, Queens. This is Rudy Dazleworth again. Boy, do I have a special one for you today. This one is called The Third Way, The Case for a Third Implementation by Jimmy Song. Buckle up buttercups because this is another episode of Plebslot Pulitzer Prize Pieces. Bitcoin development has gotten political. Over the past year, the accusations, name calling, and tribalism have gotten out of hand. People aren't debating technical merits. They've essentially been reduced to picking teams.

0:33Richard Greaser I don't think this is because Bitcoiners are bad people. I believe this is a structural problem. The way Bitcoin software development is organized creates bad incentives and bad dynamics. And in this post, I'm going to show you how a third implementation is the fix, the monopoly problem. For most of Bitcoin's history, there has been one dominant implementation, which means power is concentrated in one place. One process for everything,

1:03Richard Greaser one set of gatekeepers, one on ramp for developers. One implementation is, by definition, a single point of failure. The incentives under a monopoly are terrible. First,

1:15Richard Greaser goals are unclear or nonexistent. Having them is actually problematic as you get accusations of centralization and favoritism. But without explicit goals for the project, visibility becomes the goal. Developers get rewarded for shipping something big and attention grabbing,

1:32Richard Greaser not for doing the boring work of securing the network. They need to make their mark so they can attract grants and keep funding flowing. That may or may not have anything to do with what Bitcoin needs. I don't blame the developers for this, because the structure made it inevitable. The other problem with a monopoly is that it's one size fits all. There are many different reasons to run a node, and many different kinds of node operators. A miner has very different priorities from a merchant. An exchange cares about things a home node runner doesn't. A block explorer would love to have an address index, but Bitcoin Core doesn't have an address index, and probably never will, because they don't wanna be everything to everybody.

2:15Richard Greaser But when you're the only implementation, that's exactly what you end up having to be, and you end up serving nobody particularly well. Worst of all, users have almost no say under a monopoly. Their preferences have to filter through GitHub issues and development processes that most of them don't understand or participate in, and developers have very little incentive to listen. That's not to say that they don't. I'm sure many of them care about what users want.

2:44Richard Greaser But the incentive to listen isn't there because there's no real alternative. If you wanna run Bitcoin, you run core. The devs know that. They're not incentivized to be attentive to user feedback because the users have nowhere else to go. In other words, there's no market pressure and no accountability loop. The developers are incentivized to answer to their grant funders and to each other, not to the people actually running the software.

3:10Rod Palmer You have just listened to a preview of Plebslop Pulitzer prize pieces with Rudy Dazleworth. If you would like to hear the full piece, please subscribe to the Bugle weekly on the Fountain podcasting app. By subscribing, you get access to all sorts of premium content as well as the opportunity to support the world's most thermodynamically sound credentialed journalism. Thank you for being a listener of the Bugle Weekly.