Author: Erik Aronesty 2022-04-27 14:28:31
Published on: 2022-04-27T14:28:31+00:00
The Bitcoin community is currently debating how to measure user support for proposed soft-fork changes. The lack of a means to measure support invariably leads to claims that certain circles represent the broader set of users, which can lead to breakdowns in civility.Currently, all forms of activation under consideration involve miner signaling in one form or another. One idea is to allow transactions themselves to signal for upgrade by taking advantage of "free" bits in the version field of a transaction that are presently ignored. This would give users sybil-resistant influence over miners. However, there are many challenges with on-chain voting. Cold storage votes are probably the most important for certain proposals but are the least likely to vote. Awareness and participation in blockchain voting is typically very low and is mostly limited to big exchanges. Off-chain voting is even worse, as collecting votes off-chain by signing messages and publishing them somewhere raises questions about censorship-resistance. Moreover, people have different views of what consensus entails. The economic majority controls where the chain goes, and it is significantly easier to mobilize 1 million people "voting" with 100 satoshis each than 10,000 people voting with 100 bitcoins each. While the economic majority is essential, subverting it seems like a bad idea. The reality of control there will come out one way or another, and being honest about it is probably the best way to avoid major schisms in the future. Concerns have been raised that holders wouldn't have much say, and people transacting a lot would have a disproportionate ability to pressure miners than people who aren't transacting much.In addition to measuring user support for soft-fork changes, the Bitcoin community is discussing a proposal to incentivize CoinJoin use and enforce it as a soft fork. The proposal suggests that by enforcing CoinJoin, users would not lose ammunition but actually accrue it, creating better long-term balances of power. However, implementing this proposal requires its own soft fork.The proposal gives CoinJoin pool operators and L2 protocol implementations the power to decide consensus, which is seen as an improvement over the current status quo. While some argue that this proposal encourages spam, it is argued that if the fees are paid, it is not spam. The forum is questioning whether this scheme affords a better view into consensus than what we have today and if it can be gamed to give us a worse view into consensus. Additionally, the forum is discussing whether this proposal measures the right thing and whether a BIP specification should be written in detail.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T19:46:17.446750+00:00