Author: Sergio Demian Lerner 2017-04-06 20:42:19
Published on: 2017-04-06T20:42:19+00:00
The context discusses the importance of 95% miner signaling in preventing Bitcoin forks, such as what occurred with Ethereum HF and Ethereum Classic. Due to Bitcoin's slow difficulty re-targeting algorithm, a fork with just 95% miner support will be initially 5% slower for 2016 blocks, causing a reduction in transaction capacity but not significantly affecting confirmation times. However, the chain with only 5% hashing power has a 20x capacity reduction and confirms transactions at a much slower rate, causing the mempool to grow 400 times. This results in a significant increase in fees, which no pre-fork Bitcoin user would want to pay. In this state, the original chain becomes almost useless, taking 20 hours for a 6-block confirmation and remaining in this state for an average of 280 days. If the original blockchain hard-forks to readjust the difficulty, it will represent an alt-coin with 5% of the Bitcoin community and cannot affect Bitcoin (the segwit2mb fork). The hard-fork is conditional to 95% of the hashing power approving the segwit2mb soft-fork and the segwit soft-fork being activated. Miner signaling through flipping a bit in the nVersion field has little relevance in a hard fork, as nodes must also upgrade for it to occur. The author is interested in researching hard forks with various developers.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T23:16:03.699405+00:00