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1/ I’m fascinated by a major unsettled theme within the cryptocurrency space. Should crypto protocols be flexible or rigid? This question is relevant both on the protocol specifications, as well as the project’s attitude towards changing the specification.
2/ Each cryptocurrency network is forced to choose their place on this spectrum. Projects must weigh their ability to handle an ever increasing desire from developers for more expressive functionality with the technical risk that comes with it.
3/ Even small complications in a protocol can trigger unintended consequences or open up attack surface areas. This was witnessed with several DoS attacks on Ethereum back in 2016. Attackers used mispriced op codes to bring the network to a halt. coindesk.com/ethereum-forks…
4/ In the Bitcoin community, the answer is unequivocal: rigidity wins. Bitcoin acts as the largest and most successful shared ledger storing over $140 billion in value, and many in the community believe that the only objective is to not screw anything up.
5/ Bitcoin’s script started out fairly limited, and developers have since removed features deemed risky. In fairness to Bitcoin, they are working on several improvements that enhance flexibility, such as TapRoot. medium.com/scalar-capital…
6/ TapRoot enables limited forms of smart contracts such as Andrew Poelstra’s Scriptless Scripts. However, even these improvements still enforce rigid constraints over how transactions can be expressed. medium.com/scalar-capital…
7/ Ethereum leans towards flexibility. Ethereum is built on a highly flexible and expressive language, Solidity, that resembles JavaScript. This means that literally any computation is possible on Ethereum, provided the resource requirements are small enough.
8/ Flexibility has already come back to bite users of Ethereum. With a wide frontier of possibilities, bugs can creep into even simple contracts. One example is the Solidity Multisig contract which had critical functionality deleted by a random user. parity.io/a-postmortem-o…
9/ However, Ethereum’s flexibility is the principle reason that many developers have flocked to the platform. The project is also showing much more conservatism with future protocol updates, exemplified by its patience with developing Eth 2.0.
10/ If Ethereum developers can impose enough discipline over their development process, Ethereum may be able to thread the needle and get the best of both worlds. Lots of flexibility, but coupled with enough rigidity in the development process to thwart bugs.
11/ Other platforms aim to enforce rigidity. Tezos is built on an OCaml derivative, a functional language that’s easier to prove correct. BlockStack is developing a constrained execution model: enabling static analysis with a Turing incomplete language. blog.blockstack.org/announcing-the…
