Author: Sergio Demian Lerner 2017-04-06 21:03:12
Published on: 2017-04-06T21:03:12+00:00
In an email exchange between Sergio Demian Lerner and Btc Drak, Lerner explained the importance of 95% miner signaling in preventing a potential Bitcoin fork. He noted that Bitcoin's difficulty re-targeting algorithm is slow, so a fork with only 95% miner support would be 5% slower for the first 2016 blocks. While transaction capacity would only be reduced by 5%, the chain with 5% hashing power would have a 20x capacity reduction and confirm transactions in 20x more time, causing the mempool to grow 400 times. Additionally, fees increased 10x from the moment blocks were half full to when they became saturated. Therefore, Lerner believes no Bitcoin user would want to pay 100x the transaction fees to use such a slow and insecure network. If the original blockchain hard-forks to readjust the difficulty, it will represent an alt-coin having 5% of the Bitcoin community, and it can't affect Bitcoin (the segwit2mb fork).
Updated on: 2023-06-11T23:07:12.554588+00:00