Draft BIP: Segwit deployment with versionbits and guaranteed lock-in

Summary:

On April 26, 2017, shaolinfry via bitcoin-dev wrote a draft BIP proposal to redeploy segwit using BIP-8. This document specifies a user activated soft fork for BIP141, BIP143 and BIP147 using versionbits with guaranteed lock-in. The motivation for this BIP is that miners have been reluctant to signal the BIP9 segwit deployment despite a large portion of the Bitcoin ecosystem who want the soft fork activated. This BIP specifies a user activated soft fork (UASF) that deploys segwit again using versionbits with guaranteed lock-in on timeout if the BIP is not already locked-in or activated by the timeout. This ensures users have sufficient time to prepare and no longer require a miner supermajority, while still allowing for an earlier miner activated soft fork (MASF). Preliminary dates are deploy within a couple months, startdate Nov 16th 2017, BIP8 timeout July 4th 2018. For Bitcoin mainnet, the BIP8 start time will be midnight 16 November 2017 UTC (Epoch timestamp 1510790400) and BIP8 timeout will be 4 July 2018 UTC (Epoch timestamp 1530662400). For Bitcoin testnet, segwit is already activated so no deployment is specified.The deployment will set service bit (1) and will be deployed by BIP8 with the name "uasegwit" and using bit 2. This BIP can be deployed well in advance of the BIP8 'starttime' so that the 'timeout' will be sufficiently far in the future to allow Bitcoin users to upgrade in preparation. The 'starttime' of this BIP is after the BIP9 "segwit" timeout to remove compatibility issues with old nodes. The reference implementation of this deployment can be found at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/compare/master...shaolinfry:uasegwit-fla gday. This document is dual licensed as BSD 3-clause, and Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal. Several references are available for this BIP that include https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0008.mediawiki, https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0009.mediawiki, https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0141.mediawiki, https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0143.mediawiki and https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0147.mediawiki.

Updated on: 2023-06-12T00:33:26.638589+00:00