Author: Billy Tetrud 2022-04-27 16:17:51
Published on: 2022-04-27T16:17:51+00:00
The activation of Taproot has been a topic of debate, particularly regarding how to measure user support for proposed soft-fork changes. Miner signaling is currently the only signal available to gauge support, which frustrates many people. Keagan McClelland proposes a potential solution to measure user support more directly by allowing users to pressure miners to act on their behalf. However, challenges with on-chain voting exist, such as contentious BIP's driving up fees, miners blocking votes, and low awareness and participation in blockchain voting. Off-chain voting also presents challenges, including censorship resistance and where to collect votes.Billy Tetrud suggests an alternative way to gauge consensus through weighted polling of holders. Although it wouldn't be directly connected to the activation mechanism, it could theoretically be used if enough people were involved. Erik Aronesty addresses concerns about coins being protected by a hot/cold covenant by suggesting that taproot could sign a poll message with the key spendpath key or embed a poll-signing path in an unspendable leaf in the MAST.The author proposes a mechanism for combining transaction rules and fees for inclusion with the ability for transactions themselves to signal for upgrade. The author suggests using the "free" bits in the version field of a transaction to create a mapping between those free bits and the signaling bits in the block header. This would provide users with sybil-resistant influence over miner decisions and can be measured completely en-protocol without requiring trust in institutions that fork futures would. However, potential tweaks to the design include negative signaling or making miner signaling congruent with >X% of transactions. The author poses questions to the forum about whether this scheme affords a better view into consensus than we have today and if it can be gamed to give us a worse view into consensus. Objections, such as signaling not being voting and "pay to play," are addressed.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T19:43:22.943640+00:00