Discussion on “The Dark Side of Ossification”

For Dr. Shai Wyborski, being able to protect Bitcoin from quantum threats without requiring a soft fork is not an achievement. It’s a warning signal. “The very fact that what should be a simple upgrade requires such a desperately creative solution shows how pernicious the ‘no forks’ mentality is,” he wrote on April 10 in response to a new proposal to protect Bitcoin with current protocol rules. The cryptologist’s diagnosis was, “This is the dark side of ossification.”

Wyborski is a quantum cryptologist with a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-author of the GHOSTDAG protocol, the technical foundation of the Kaspa network. I looked into it specifically Migrating cryptographic systems to schemes that are resistant to quantum computers.

This Thursday, StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy published a paper titled: Quantum secure Bitcoin transactions without soft forks (Bitcoin transactions are secure, whereas quantum computing without soft forks is secure). he paper Suggest QSB, A scheme to protect Bitcoin transactions from Scholl’s algorithm No need to change the protocol.

The cost of not forking

Wyborski’s criticism does not point to the technical quality of Levy’s work. What it brings into question is what its existence reveals. The Bitcoin community has developed a deeply rooted culture of resistance to change, forcing researchers to design highly complex solutions to avoid even proposed modifications to the protocol.

Wyborski points to this resistance as “protocol ossification,” and describes the phenomenon as a system that avoids updating itself even when the environment demands it. In Bitcoin, expressed in organized opposition to soft forksthis is a non-breaking, backwards compatible update, but requires community consensus to implement.

For Wyborski, such consensus will never come. And until that arrives, researchers are designing increasingly sophisticated patches for problems they think will eventually require a direct response. “At some point change will be necessary and there will be friction. “New cryptos are not something that can be seamlessly integrated into Bitcoin,” he cautioned.

StarkWare co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson supported that view and expressed hope that the community would be open to soft forks again. Other discussants compared QSB’s approach to the mathematical problem of packing 17 squares into a larger square. Although technically valid, the user experience is questionable.

This debate is not new; it reveals tensions that have been a topic of discussion for many years. The rigidity of the protocol, considered by many to be Bitcoin’s greatest strength, could be its biggest stumbling block for some if the environment changes and urgent fixes are needed.