Power User Exploration Phase

Work : Protocol Developers

Buy-In : Power Users

Monitor : Researchers, Maintainers

The second step in building support for your idea should be to make something concrete that people can use to explore your idea further.

At a high level this will generally involve:

• Building a usable prototype
  • Getting consensus changes merged into inquisition and activated on signet.
  • Making and maintaining your own fork of Bitcoin node software and rolling your own signet/regtest chain for people to experiment on.
  • Deploying the feature on Liquid, or Liquid Testnet, or Chia, or some other chain with a “coin” model (rather than an “account” one)
• Make a step-by-step tutorial on how users can try out the prototypes
• Get power users to participate in “red team” trials, where you see what happens when things go wrong, and see if your change can survive in an adversarial environment

The main goals of progressing through this phase are:

• Making sure your idea can actually be implemented as conceived
• Testing your idea in practice to find unexpected flaws
• Having a ready-to-use implementation to present to industry participants

The latter point is especially key in order to make progress through the next phase.