Staging CHIPs on Testnet - The first knowledge sharing application in Vietnam

One reason I’ve been thinking about this: I believe the math and introspection CHIPs will almost certainly be ready to “lock-in” in this November and go live in May 2022. But some of the other CHIPs should probably wait, if only to set a careful precedent.

I agreed with @emergent_reasons here:

Ya, I’m also thinking it would be best for the May 2022 upgrade to only include the math and introspection CHIPs. It would be really great to set the precedent that BCH consensus moves carefully with >1 year of review.

The math and introspection CHIPs will solve the most urgent issues with the VM, unblocking a lot of really valuable use cases. The other consensus CHIPs I’ve proposed – targeted limits, bounded loops, and PMv3 – are very important, but can stand to have a longer time horizon.

Limits and loops would be immediately useful, but aren’t actually blocking any ready-to-deploy use cases, they would just make those use cases more efficient. And PMv3 could be immediately useful to improve the efficiency and UX of a few use cases, but big things like SLP 2.0, decentralized exchanges, and prediction markets will probably take another 6-12 months of development to have the first production-ready implementations.

One idea I’ve been thinking about: we can get almost the same value by coordinating deployment of limits, loops, and PMv3 to the primary testnet in May 2022 (the testnet used by most block explorers). That would give the other proposals a full year to be thoroughly tested while allowing developers to start working on real, complex applications using them in a reliable, almost-production environment.

Thoughts?

It would be a great precedent to set that future consensus changes are staged on the primary testnet for 6-12 months before mainnet deployment. And I think we’re at a sweet spot development-wise: the math and introspection CHIPs really reduce the current pain for BCH contract developers. If we got the other proposals on testnet in May 2022, there aren’t a lot of other big pain points which developers are going to be eager to “fast-track”, and we can afford to be much more patient with e.g. future crypto APIs, zero-knowledge proofs, MAST, multi-key input aggregation, etc.