Scaling has been a heated topic for the bitcoin community for some time. Further, even when a technology does become available, getting people to use it becomes the next big hurdle. Segregated Witness has not been fully adopted by all wallets and service providers, and not all exchanges batch transactions, to name two examples.
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Officially announced today, July 20, 2018, Bitcoin Optech[2] (which stands for operations technology) is creating a forum where Bitcoin developers and companies can come together to solve scaling problems in harmony through workshops and online discussions.
The project was initiated by John Newbery and James O'Beirne, developers at New York-based Chaincode Labs, a cryptocurrency development company and a major contributor to Bitcoin Core[3] — Chaincode Labs is paying their salaries to work part-time on the venture. Former Google product manager Steve Lee is Optech’s project manager. Further support comes from Xapo[4] CEO Wences Casares and institutional investor John Pfeffer in the way of seed funding to cover contractors and expenses.
“Our hypothesis is if we can provide forums or bring together other open source contributors and industry players and try to help those industry players adopt scaling best practices, that could be a more fruitful than shouting at each other on Reddit,” Newbery told Bitcoin Magazine.
The group is targeted to Bitcoin’s open source developers, exchanges, wallet providers and other industry players. The idea is to bring everyone together to hash out the best practices for adopting solutions like Segregated Witness[5], transaction batching and improved fee estimation. In the future, Bitcoin Optech may perhaps also tackle the Lightning Network[6], Schnorr signatures[7] and scriptless scripts[8], when these technologies become more mature.
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