Mike Schmidt Calls for Bitcoin Development to Return to Infrastructure, the More Stable the Protocol, the More the Application Layer Dares to Bet
Mike Schmidt criticized the hard forks, proof-of-work changes, and soft fork routes pushed by a few leaders, advocating that Bitcoin developers should abandon centralized roadmaps and return to decentralized collaboration.
He defined the controversy as follows: some upgrade proposals concentrate resources on addressing the increasingly narrow issue of spam transactions on an alternative chain, but may introduce more radical changes to the consensus layer; his initiative is to direct development capabilities towards mainnet security, privacy, layer-2 payment networks, mining pool centralization, testing, and code review.
Bitcoin users and businesses ultimately purchase predictable settlement and censorship-resistant monetary attributes, rather than frequently changing protocol features; mining pools, node operators, and development teams bear compatibility and coordination costs during upgrades. Capital will lean towards layer-2 payments like Lightning, wallet security, privacy tools, and mining pool decentralization solutions; development groups that rely on competing for the definition of protocol rules to gain influence will face execution constraints brought by consensus dispersion.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Bitcoin has not been without upgrades in its history, but the cost of upgrades is extremely high. SegWit was activated in 2017, and Taproot was activated in 2021; the former alleviated transaction malleability and expanded block space, while the latter introduced Schnorr signatures and improved the privacy and efficiency of complex transactions. Both changes adopted soft forks rather than hard forks, reflecting the Bitcoin community's long-standing preference for backward compatibility and slow, coordinated evolutionary paths.
The mobilization of capital and resources in Bitcoin is not determined by a single foundation. Developers submit BIPs, client maintainers write implementations, and miners, node operators, wallet companies, exchanges, and users decide whether to upgrade; BIPs are merely a proposal mechanism and do not automatically confer protocol power. The miner signaling during the SegWit activation process, user-activated soft forks, and node deployments have proven that there is no fixed command chain between code contributions, hash power, and economic nodes.
Mining centralization is the structural problem that he claims should be prioritized. Mining pools attract independent miners through risk-sharing, naturally forming aggregation; solutions like BetterHash attempt to decentralize block transaction selection to machine operators rather than having it decided uniformly by mining pools. Compared to rewriting proof of work, such paths do not change Bitcoin's consensus security model but rather reconstruct the power distribution of the hash power coordination layer.
This belongs to industry chain reconstruction. The previous stage of competition focused on who could influence the underlying protocol, while the next stage's value will be more embedded in payment channels, custody solutions, privacy layers, wallet experiences, and infrastructure security on top of the mainnet. The more stable the protocol, the more motivation the application layer has to invest long-term capital; frequent disputes at the protocol layer will pull development resources back from user products to governance games.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Consensus is not a roadmap, but the sum of refusals
The more stable the protocol, the more the application layer dares to bet
Changing rules can create noise, but building infrastructure can accumulate value