Jimmy Song:
Altcoins don’t care about Taproot. Taproot locked in, Galoy, Gemini dev sponsorship, El Salvador LN stats, What El Salvador means for BTC, Nigeria should adopt BTC, art and integrity, BTC the meter for economics, Krugman very wrong Bitcoin Tech Talk #244
Taproot locked in this past week and Bitcoiners celebrated. Altcoiners, on the other hand, couldn’t care less. I suspect that they don’t even know what it is or what it’s supposed to do. And why should they? Altcoin developers haven’t shown the slightest interest in adding Taproot to their codebases.
The question is, why aren’t they interested? What’s preventing them from embracing what are some very clear wins? There are three reasons for this which I’ll explore today.
- First, altcoins are perpetually lacking in developers. Ironically, many of them are getting paid, usually through the premine or some continuing developer subsidy, but it is nevertheless difficult to get developers there to implement anything, even if it’s a line-by-line port of Bitcoin Core’s code. Not only do upgrades like Taproot require a good understanding of the math and computer science behind the constructs, but they require good testers, documenters and adversarial thinkers that can figure out how the new feature interacts with whatever is available on their platforms. Altcoins lack this, so they mostly just stay static and don’t bother with obvious user-empowering upgrades like Taproot because they don’t have the developers to do it.
- Second, altcoins have their own marketing to push. A coin founded on proof-of-stake has to make proof-of-stake compelling. Whatever developer resources they have tends to go toward whatever centralized marketing message (fast transactions! privacy! dentists!) that they’re trying to push. These are organizations that are very much top-down, meaning that all the developers are committed to a road map and that doesn’t include off-map projects like Taproot. It would hurt their marketing message too much.
- Third, altcoins are centralized. As a result, getting better block efficiency, faster signature verification or reducing the specs necessary to run a full node are not the least bit interesting to altcoins. They all already know they’re centralized so why bother with optimizing anything? Why bother make running a full node easier when it’s already really difficult and few people run them anyway? In other words, altcoins don’t care about features that help individuals have self-sovereignty.
Read the rest of the article here https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/why-altcoins-arent-copying-taproot
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