Community Offers $ 200,000 To Find Bugs In Next Bitcoin Update

Key facts:

The reward amounts to 3.6 BTC in total to improve the BIP-119.

The BIP-119 already receives opinions for and against.

Ecosystem participants have offered roughly $ 170,000, or 3.6 BTC, to anyone who finds a bug or bug in the Bitcoin BIP-119 upgrade proposal, which could be the next major protocol update.

The BIP-119 update, which proposes to automate Bitcoin transactions in a similar way to smart contracts, has received little criticism against it, but also demonstrations of support.

Your developer, Jeremy rubin, has stated that the criticism against the BIP-119 does not justify that this update becomes effective in this new year 2022, for which he offered USD 10,000 to whoever managed to find a bug or software error in this proposal, which already has several years of development.

Given this, more members of the community offered to reward the investigation and search for errors with more bitcoins for the cause. Companies like Luxor Tech Y Bitcoin Magazine, and entrepreneurs like Alistair milne, they are collaborating.

In fact, some argue that this is one of the biggest rewards offered to the development of open source software in its history, which is disputed by Strike and the Human Rights Foundation, who recently offered 3 BTC to create BTC wallets that implement Lightning and are open source.

Given that the rewards offered by those who support the BIP-119 already amount to 3.6 BTC, Jeremy Rubin clarified that they would be announcing a different challenge and award structure than “winner takes all”, so they are not encourage the finding of a single big error, but of small adjustments that may arise and that are necessary to solve.

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Comments against the BIP-119 are already being felt

The main criticism that is made against the BIP-119 argues that the whole process has gone too fast for the level of study and understanding that the community has of this proposal.

Two notable ecosystem personalities, the developer Michael Folkson, and the businessman John carvalho, left their opinions about it on the GitHub of the UTXOS organization, led by Jeremy Rubin and leading the development and discussion on the BIP-119.

Folkson argues that further experimentation should be done with BIP-119 before embarking on the activation route, which was proposed by Jeremy Rubin on December 24, 2021, CriptoNoticias reported.

Folkson points out that just having a long list of use cases is not enough to undertake the soft fork of the Bitcoin code, and there is also the risk of contention; that is to say, that a good part of the community does not want to activate the BIP-119 and there is a breakdown of the consensus between the Bitcoin nodes.

In addition, he thinks that it is still not clear whether OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY or CTV, the command proposed by BIP-119 to execute the concept of “covenants” (agreements, templates), is the best way to carry out the ability to sign transactions that can run automatically in time according to the set parameters.

“Activating a command that may end up not being used if better alternatives emerge would be a huge waste of time for the community,” he said.

For his part, John Carvalho, CEO of Synonym, does not consider it positive that Bitcoin has updates of this type so soon, noting that it has not been long since the activation of Taproot, in November 2021. It also points to the lack of understanding of the community about this development:

Not being an engineer, but with more expertise than the average bitcoiner, I feel that covenants are not widely understood and I am deeply concerned that taking Bitcoin there could have unforeseen consequences for the network, supply, and incentive structure.

John Carvalho, CEO of Synonym.

Carvalho also explained that in his opinion, Rubin has been too aggressive in promoting CTV and that he even tried to introduce the topic prematurely during the debates over the activation of Taproot.

This tells him, he says, that Jeremy Rubin could ignore some conflicts the proposal could have, and that perhaps, deep down, the incentives to introduce CTV might not be aligned with the interests of bitcoiners.

Given these opinions, Jeremy Rubin pointed out that they are not technical observations, so he invited the community to take this route and claim the reward if they find a technical error.

For its part, the developer of Bitcoin and Lightning, Antoine poinsot, also expressed concern about the timeliness of this activation.

“I think we should have slow and infrequent activations of the soft forks. We need to be sure where we are going before we commit, “he said.

Discussions will remain open, while the 3.6 BTC reward awaits those who can disprove the activation of the BIP-119 from a technical point of view.