May 23, 2026

I lost track of how many times going back many years that were were told that bitcoind was maximally optimized and utterly flawless - not an exaggeration. It was only when libbitcoin v4 started showing performance numbers that any real effort went into IBD. It directly spawned "swift sync" and related projects, forced maintainers to start reviewing optimization PRs, and resulted in funding for both. Good thing there is some actual competition, as otherwise they would have already abandoned validation. We've stalled that plan.