The future of the Bitcoin Core GUI

The discussion revolves around the potential enhancements and applications of a basic bitcoin-tui project available on GitHub. The project presents an opportunity to transform it into a mini block/mempool explorer, which would significantly enhance its utility. This could include features for tracking soft-fork deployments using getdeploymentinfo, providing a nice visual display of such deployments. Furthermore, incorporating control functionalities alongside the existing viewing capabilities, such as "stop", "setnetworkactive", "addnode", "disconnectnode", "setban", is suggested to make the tool more comprehensive.

There's an acknowledgment that while the tool serves certain purposes well, it lacks in areas where bitcoin-qt shines, particularly in offering safe access to Bitcoin Core's wallet functionality. However, the possibility of integrating file chooser options for loading and saving PSBTs (Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions) indicates no inherent limitation to expanding its capabilities in this direction. Another point of consideration is simplifying the process of running a Bitcoin node on Windows or MacOS for users who are not developers or power users. It raises the question of whether having separate user interfaces for node management and wallet usage might be beneficial, although browsing transactions in the blockchain/mempool could be advantageous for both sets of users.

The idea of extending wallet functionality through a web UI is met with caution due to the complexities it might introduce. An alternative proposed involves developing a thin GUI launcher app for Windows/MacOS environments. This app would automatically launch both the daemon and the TUI, serving as a display widget for the TUI. This solution aims to capture most of the convenience features desired by both developers, by reducing the amount of code they need to write and maintain, and users, by simplifying operations to just clicking an icon. Despite the potential aesthetic drawbacks of this approach, it is considered a viable way to achieve a significant portion of the desired functionality. Moreover, since all operations would be conducted over RPC, there remains scope for others to develop more visually appealing alternatives that retain full functionality, encouraging further independent projects.