Published on: 2017-04-14T02:22:18+00:00
In a recent discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, concerns were raised about the language used to describe future network upgrades. The debate focused on whether the term "network upgrade" was misleading and whether a proposed attack on the old chain was an attempt to transfer economic activity from BTC to BTU. There were also questions about the ethics of minority hash power producers in such situations.One concern raised by Emin Gün Sirer was that filling empty blocks with transactions could lead to forks and create a new attack vector. He warned that bad actors could time the flood of new transactions with the discovery of a block by a competitor in order to orphan the block and fork the chain. However, Peter R criticized the use of the term "network upgrade" instead of the technical term "hard fork," finding it misleading. Eric Voskuil had presented the proposal on behalf of an unknown group, which led to questions about the lack of clarity around the proposal and its proponents.The discussion also touched on the activation of segwit through bip9-based soft-fork. Bryan Bishop and Peter R discussed the possibility of a hash power minority not upgrading and producing a minority branch. Peter R suggested that any invalid blocks produced by the minority would be orphaned, serving as a wake-up call to upgrade. However, Bishop refuted this claim, stating that miner blocks will not be orphaned unless they are intentionally segwit-invalid.Trevin Hofmann and Bryan also discussed the issue of non-upgraded miners producing invalid blocks. Hofmann argued that if non-upgraded miners follow the new rules, their blocks will not be orphaned. Bryan countered that there is no need for a "wake-up call to upgrade" as the point of a soft-fork is to reduce incompatibility. He suggested running "border nodes" to ensure compliance.The proposed techniques to reduce the chances of a blockchain split involve orphaning the blocks of non-compliant miners and re-organizing any minority branch with empty blocks. However, some members of the community believe that a peaceful split would be preferable to these proposed tactics for enforcing the upgrade. Peter R believes that miners will not upgrade until they are confident that no minority chain will survive.The discussion also touched on the definition and implementation of soft forks and hard forks. There were concerns about the lack of precision and consistency in discussing these concepts, and whether miners should have the right to enforce soft forks. Alex Morcos expressed disapproval of implementing Segregated Witness (SegWit) as a soft fork, arguing that it prevents users from using the rules they want.Overall, there is ongoing debate and concern within the Bitcoin community regarding network upgrades, terminology, consensus requirements, and the potential for blockchain splits. Various proposals and arguments have been put forward to address these issues, with differing opinions on the best approaches to ensuring a smooth transition and minimizing disruption.Another issue of concern within the Bitcoin community is the centralization of mining power. Currently, only a small group of people control a majority of the hashing power, leading to concerns about their ability to manipulate the network for their own agenda. The fear is that these miners could kill the valid chain to force economic activity onto their adversary-controlled chain.One proposed update is to ignore empty blocks as a means of mitigating the problem of blocking empty or near-empty blocks. However, there are concerns about defense from blocks that are intentionally small but not empty. It may be possible to have nodes ignore not only empty blocks but also abnormally small blocks compared to the number of valid transactions in the mempool.There needs to be discussion on various attacks and how they can be guarded against, along with contingency plans. Increasing the number of full nodes is suggested as a priority, along with designing incentives for people to run full nodes and setting up a system for people to set up full nodes in a timely manner. It is proposed that Bram Cohen be asked to resurrect the bitcoin miner Epic Scale, which could increase mining power if users upgrade. Additionally, activating proof of space by anticipation is suggested as an alternative solution.Promoting full nodes by making the bitcoin-qt blockchain and chain state available through torrents is also suggested to encourage more people to set up full nodes. However, it is acknowledged that there is historical consensus between miners and developers that may have hindered the prioritization of increasing the number of full nodes.In the email conversation on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, concerns were raised over a proposal to update nodes to ignore empty blocks. The concern was that this would make block validity depend on things that are not in the blockchain and could lead to different mempool sizes for different nodes, causing a lack of consensus. There was also concern about malicious miners orphaning the chain after many blocks, even with non-empty blocks, and whether it was possible to mitigate this.The overall discussion revolved around the issue of centralization of mining power and the potential threat posed by a small group of miners controlling a large amount of hash power.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T19:54:14.648636+00:00