Author: Gregory Maxwell 2014-04-24 08:19:20
Published on: 2014-04-24T08:19:20+00:00
The email conversation on April 24, 2014 between Mike Hearn and an unknown individual discusses the use of coinbase scriptSigs for voting purposes. It was stated that coinbase sigs are used to gauge the safety of enforcing a soft fork several times, not just for P2SH. This mechanism is not considered as voting but rather a feature decision mechanism which can be coercive and give hash-power bidders control, even when their interests may not align with the population that owns and uses Bitcoin in general. The conversation continues by discussing how making distributed systems work in a complex world is hard, and it would be easier to declare miners as "trusted parties" and require them to always collude to produce a single consensus view of the world that is always honest and never contradictory. However, this does not work as they aren't individually trusted or trustworthy. Lastly, the conversation mentions that temporarily censoring transactions by orphaning otherwise valid blocks that contain them for as long as you retain a majority is possible and impossible to prevent in this architecture. This is not the same as deleting, as deleting suggests the misconception that a majority of miners can do anything they want.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T18:44:08.397025+00:00