Towards a means of measuring user support for Soft Forks

Summary:

The Bitcoin community is currently debating how to measure user support for proposed soft-fork changes, as there is no means of measuring it. This has led to breakdowns in civility, with people claiming that their circles are more representative of the set of Bitcoin users as a whole. Furthermore, due to the trauma of the block size wars, people devalue "miner signaling" as a signal for market demand, leaving it as the only signal for work with.To address this issue, Keagan proposes a mechanism whereby transactions themselves can signal for an upgrade. The proposed system would combine the rejection of blocks that don't follow rules and paying fees for transaction inclusion. Transactions would have free bits in the version field that are presently ignored. A mapping between some of those free bits and the signaling bits in the block header would allow for users to have a means of sybil-resistant influence over miner decisions.Under this set of conditions, if a miner cannot collect the fees for a transaction without signaling, the user's fee becomes active economic pressure for the miner to signal. Some may take issue with the idea that people can pay for the outcome they want, but the proposed mechanism is measurable completely en-protocol and doesn't require trust in institutions that fork futures would.There are many potential tweaks to the design proposed above, including a notion of negative signaling and making it such that miner signaling must be congruent with >X% of transactions. However, some anticipated objections include the belief that signaling isn't voting, and that this proposal is just "pay to play," allowing the wealthy to make consensus decisions. The biggest question posed to the forum is whether a scheme like this affords us a better view into consensus than we have today, and what the right thing to measure is. Keagan asks whether he should write a BIP spec'ing this out in detail.

Updated on: 2023-05-22T19:45:42.510790+00:00