The Chain Not Taken

(with apologies to Frost)

Two chains diverged in crypto wood, And sorry I could not merge them both And be one coder, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent with miners' oath; Then took the other, just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it signaled BIP so rare; Though devs for months would stand and glare, Their mailing list debates aflame, And both that morning equally lay In blocks no node had validated. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing forks lead folks astray, I doubted I'd revert once fated. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere onchain, years and hence: Two chains diverged, and so did I— I took the one with Drivechain nigh, And that has made all difference.

An Opinion

There's something philosophically important about drivechain that brings me back to what Bitcoin felt like when I first got into it.

It requires humility — you need to put aside your ego and the narratives from people around you to deeply look into the idea. People might not like Paul and I agree he might be a bit of a different human being, but the idea... the idea is priceless, pure genius.

As Einstein said, there are 5 ascending levels of intelligence: smart, intelligent, brilliant, genius, and simple. The highest level — simple — is when you can take something incredibly complex and distill it down to its essence. That's drivechain. It's elegant simplicity that solves Bitcoin's scalability without compromising its core values. True genius lies in making the complex simple, and that's exactly what Paul achieved here.

← Back to Home