Antoine Poinsot on Bitcoin Core's Priorities

The discussion highlights a critical debate within the Bitcoin Core community regarding the approach to evolving the project's structure and feature set. One viewpoint emphasizes the potential benefits of restructuring the project into multiple repositories as a strategy to enhance maintenance, streamline code review processes, and facilitate contributions without interfering with each other’s work. This perspective argues that such a reorganization could, contrary to concerns about deprecating significant features, actually foster the development and release of a more diverse array of interfaces and features over time. It is suggested that this could be achieved without incurring substantial technical debt.

The conversation also reflects on the lengthy timelines associated with integrating new features and improvements into Bitcoin Core. The process of adding pruning support to a feature, developing a functional test for this behavior, and ensuring its robustness illustrates the slow but steady pace of development, which is attributed not to the current developers' capabilities but to the increasing complexity and interdependencies within the project. These complexities make it challenging to reason about the interactions among various components, such as indexes, peer-to-peer networking (p2p), pruning, the wallet, the graphical user interface (GUI), and others like assumeutxo and notification systems.

There's an expressed belief that implementing better interfaces and some degree of separation between components—potentially through dividing the project into separate repositories—could alleviate these challenges. Such structural changes are seen as a way to improve the project's capacity to deliver both a highly scrutinized core and node component, alongside enhanced index, wallet, and GUI software tailored for users. Moreover, it addresses the concern that the current state of code development is becoming less enjoyable for contributors, potentially leading to developer attrition over the past decade. The cumbersome nature of having to manage every aspect of the project while focusing on specific improvements could be mitigated by this proposed reorganization, possibly rejuvenating developer engagement and productivity.

Finally, the feasibility of separating certain parts of the project, such as the GUI, is considered more straightforward at present. However, there remains uncertainty regarding whether the interfaces and libraries for the wallet are adequately prepared for such a division. This ongoing discussion underscores the delicate balance between innovation, maintainability, and developer well-being within the Bitcoin Core project, suggesting that strategic restructuring could be key to its future success and sustainability.