Author: Michael Folkson 2021-04-10 12:07:40
Published on: 2021-04-10T12:07:40+00:00
A recent email exchange between developers of Bitcoin's Core software raised concerns about the use of a coin toss to decide whether to deploy a key upgrade. It sparked fears that important decisions were being taken too lightly. David Harding, one of the developers, said the method was a valid way of breaking a deadlock and had been used before. But Michael Folkson, who initiated the exchange, said the idea made a mockery of the work done by people who spent months working on soft fork activations. However, he did say expressing preferences on a pull request is fine. Folkson also retracted an earlier statement in which he expressed a preference for “block height” as a solution over the Merkle Tree Proof (MTP) approach. He said he had concluded that the majority of comments from reviewers preferred block height. There is an open core PR for Speedy Trial (#21377) that appears to be the best chance of getting activation code merged into Core. The more testing and code review this core PR receives the better. If it continues to make progress the discussion will then need to move onto a timetable. The comments came after a decision was made using a coin toss between two competing proposals for Taproot, the next major software upgrade for Bitcoin. Critics have made light of the fact that the multi-billion dollar industry appeared to rely on a simple game of chance to make a key decision.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T19:59:32.092805+00:00