Industry Evaluation Phase

Work : Industry, Protocol Developers

Buy-In : Industry

Monitor : Researchers, Power Users

Most changes to Bitcoin will have some impact on existing Bitcoin businesses. This phase is about ensuring that those impacts are understood, that any negative impacts are far outweighed by the positive, and, ultimately, that the impacts are large enough to be worth the effort.

At a minimum, this involves contacting impacted projects, talking to the people maintaining them, and seeing if the change integrates easily, and if any problems can be resolved. If you find things to improve here, it’s important to go back and improve them, whether that’s a small tweak to the implementation or a major redesign.

Ideally, it would be desirable to have experimental releases of affected products that include updates to support or adapt to the proposed changes. For open source products, this may be something that proposal authors can achieve independently.

The goal at this stage is to demonstrate that the proposal lives up to its potential at a technical level. That it’s promised gains are large enough to warrant involvement from industry, and that the implementation works as promised.