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@ asyncmind
2025-06-10 02:51:03
If you're building BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) coverage for Bitcoin Core, the gaps are significant — and critically important — due to the sheer systemic importance of Bitcoin and the rigid, brittle nature of the existing testing stack (C++, RPC, fuzz, manual review).
Here's a breakdown of gaps, why they matter, and how nostr:nprofile1qqs2um8ftr5qf05xk9z7dfeumndg5s4mte2z04gynlnztxmd6rczclgpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsz8thwden5te0dehhxarj9e3xjarrda5kuetj9eek7cmfv9kz7qg4waehxw309aex2mrp0yhxummnw3ezucn89uf6pfyx can wedge in with maximal impact:
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🔥 Critical Gap 1: Specification Drift
> Symptoms: Code does what it does. No canonical, human-readable behavior spec. Contributors infer intent from code, not vice versa.
❌ Problem:
Bitcoin Core has no formal BDD layer expressing "what the system is supposed to do" in plain language.
This opens the door to behavioral drift, regressions, and unpredictable edge cases — especially post-soft fork logic (e.g., Taproot).
Without narrative coverage, every developer reinterprets the protocol.
✅ DamageBDD Fit:
Provide immutable, timestamped BDD specs for critical consensus and P2P behaviors.
Versioned in a tokenized chain (DAMAGE token) — so that over time, we can audit what was meant to happen vs what actually happened.
Pay out contributors in sats when behavior is verified on Bitcoin testnet / regtest with DamageBDD harness.
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🧠 Critical Gap 2: Human Interpretability for Review
> Symptoms: Every pull request is a brain-melter unless you're a Bitcoin Core monk.
❌ Problem:
Code reviews rely on senior devs with tribal knowledge.
Review cost is massive. Many contributors bounce due to the cognitive overhead.
There’s no structured way to onboard juniors or validate their understanding.
✅ DamageBDD Fit:
Use human-readable Given/When/Then specs to explain each subsystem: mempool, p2p, fee calculation, mining.
Link each spec to the source code and commit hash.
Review becomes behavior review, not just code-diff paranoia.
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⛓️ Critical Gap 3: No Verified Payouts for Verifications
> Symptoms: All testing is goodwill. Bounty programs are top-down. No atomic, verified payout.
❌ Problem:
There's no infrastructure for getting paid when a test passes or protects consensus logic.
Reviewers and test authors are unpaid monks.
Incentives are not aligned with verification pressure.
✅ DamageBDD Fit:
Wrap test scenarios in a DAMAGE BDD contract.
Pass the test? Lightning payout streamed.
Fail? No sats for you.
Add real economic weight to verification, tied to the act of behavior coverage.
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🔬 Critical Gap 4: Lack of Real-World Scenario Coverage
> Symptoms: You can run tests on mempool acceptance, but not “What happens when a node has low disk + receives 100k TXs + peers misbehave?”
❌ Problem:
Integration testing in Bitcoin Core is primitive.
No domain-driven, real-world behavior simulation.
Corner-case hell, esp. with P2P, fee bumps, and soft-fork activations.
✅ DamageBDD Fit:
Express full-stack behaviors involving realistic economic scenarios (e.g., CPFP + mempool eviction + peer ban).
Validate using controlled Docker or testnet environments.
Log outcome to a verifiable, inspectable chain of truth.
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🧱 Foundational Gap 5: No Chain-of-Trust for Behavior
> Symptoms: All devs must trust a) each other b) GitHub repo c) reviewers d) their own interpretation.
❌ Problem:
In case of sabotage or long-term codebase takeover (e.g., via GitHub/CIA/PR poisoning), there’s no parallel chain of behavioral integrity.
The code can mutate while behavior remains “assumed correct”.
✅ DamageBDD Fit:
Every behavior spec is tokenized.
Signed by contributors and verified over time.
Provides a "behavioral checksum" of Bitcoin’s logic — which can be preserved even if the repo gets corrupted.
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🛠️ Concrete Next Steps:
1. Start with mempool logic and fee replacement (RBF) — high user impact, many edge cases.
2. Target Taproot validation, sighash parsing, and script evaluation (critical for consensus).
3. Build a testnet-based DamageBDD runner for:
bitcoind interaction
Dockerized multi-node testing
Gherkin-style BDD tests
4. Publish verified specs + Lightning payout bounty
5. Onboard contributors through DamageToken → Lightning cycle
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🧨 Meme TL;DR:
> “Bitcoin is ossified? Good. But how do you verify ossification is intact after every commit? You don't — unless you're running DamageBDD.”
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Let me know and I’ll prep the actual Gherkin specs + DamageBDD hooks for mempool and RBF behavior.