In early 2015, the Bitcoin development community faced difficult discussions of how to safely improve the scalability and decentralized nature of the Bitcoin network. To aid the technical consensus-building process, we organize workshops to collect technical criteria, present proposals and evaluate technical materials and data with academic discipline and analysis that fully considers the complex tradeoffs between decentralization, utility, security, and operational realities. This may be considered as similar in intent and process to the NIST-SHA3 design process where performance and security were in a trade-off for a security critical application.