Author: Jared Lee Richardson 2017-04-01 06:55:42
Published on: 2017-04-01T06:55:42+00:00
Sergio Demian Lerner, a Bitcoin developer, has proposed a solution to the current Bitcoin deadlock. He is calling for a unified Bitcoin community and is asking developers to give their opinions, suggest changes, audit, and take a stand with him. Lerner welcomes contributions to the segwit2mb project, but stresses that any patch should be as simple to audit as possible, with a limit of ~150 lines of code modified. He also notes that improvements unrelated to a 2 Mb increase or segwit should not be part of segwit2Mb. This proposal should not prevent other consensus proposals from being simultaneously merged; segwit2mb is a last resort solution in case consensus cannot be reached on anything better. Finally, Lerner states that the proposal is only a starting point and that community feedback is expected and welcomed.Sergio Demian Lerner proposed Segwit2Mb, a minimal patch that aims to untangle the current conflict between different political positions regarding segwit activation or an increase of the on-chain blockchain space through a standard block size increase. The sole objective of this proposal is to re-unite the Bitcoin community and avoid a cryptocurrency split. It combines segwit as it is today in Bitcoin 0.14+ with a 2MB block size hard-fork activated ONLY if segwit activates (95% of miners signaling), but at a fixed future date. This proposal does not imply a compromise to the future scalability or decentralization of Bitcoin, as a small increase in block size has been proven by several core and non-core developers not to affect Bitcoin value propositions.The tentative lock-in and hard-fork dates are April 29th, 2017, August 29th, 2017 and December 14th, 2017 respectively. The hard-fork is conditional to 95% of the hashing power approving the segwit2mb soft-fork, and the segwit soft-fork being activated. Although the code was built by forking the master branch of Bitcoin Core, mixing a few lines of code from Jeff Garzik's BIP102, and defining a second versionbits activation bit, Lerner prefers to wait to publish the source code until more comments have been received from the community.In terms of pure technical changes, a) utilizing the "hard fork signaling bit" in the nVersion of the block, b) limiting non-SegWit transactions, c) having replay protection in any HF, d) tweaking the witness discount, and e) additional commitments at the top of the merkle root are some issues that need to be considered before betting the continued security of Bitcoin on exponential on-chain growth, something which has historically never been seen.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T23:17:24.341286+00:00