Antoine Poinsot on Bitcoin Core's Priorities

The dialogue emphasizes the critical importance of preserving Bitcoin's core principles, including confiscation resistance, censorship resistance, and monetary supply consistency. The author values these principles highly, highlighting that the security and autonomy of using Bitcoin hinge on individuals operating their personal full nodes, ensuring the enforcement of consensus rules. This perspective underscores a concern over the potential dominance of weak validators, who rely on third-party nodes, potentially undermining the very attributes that make Bitcoin valuable to its adherents.

The discussion transitions to the evolution of Bitcoin Core development, noting the increased number of developers and available funding compared to the project's early days. Despite this growth, the author questions why there seems to be reluctance or difficulty in continuing the development of wallet and GUI components within the Bitcoin Core project. The narrative suggests that a well-funded development environment should logically support ongoing enhancement of these crucial user interfaces.

A significant part of the conversation revolves around the challenges faced by external wallets in connecting with Bitcoin Core for transaction validation. Historical attempts to introduce interfaces that would facilitate easier integration for wallet users are highlighted, including proposals for a scriptPubKey (spk) index and secure remote RPC access. These examples illustrate a broader issue of Bitcoin Core's perceived hostility towards developing interfaces that cater to the needs of external wallet developers and, by extension, the end-users. The removal or neutering of previously available interfaces further exacerbates this problem, seemingly pushing the ecosystem towards reliance on third-party software solutions.

The author also touches on specific wallets that have found workarounds by utilizing Bitcoin Core in a background or watch-only mode, suggesting that while direct support for user-friendly validation interfaces is lacking, indirect methods still demonstrate the underlying potential. However, this approach is not viewed as a substitute for direct, accessible interfaces that empower users to independently validate transactions through their full nodes.

In conclusion, the author expresses deep concern over the narrowing scope of the Bitcoin Core project and its implications for individual users' ability to validate transactions autonomously. There's a call for prioritizing the development of interfaces that would enable wider user engagement with full node validation processes, challenging the project's current trajectory towards reduced accessibility and utility for the broader Bitcoin community. This stance advocates for a more inclusive development strategy that aligns with the original ethos of Bitcoin, emphasizing decentralization, user empowerment, and the preservation of fundamental principles over technical perfection or minimalism.