Author: Keagan McClelland 2022-04-27 18:32:33
Published on: 2022-04-27T18:32:33+00:00
The Bitcoin community is currently engaged in a debate about how to measure user support for proposed soft-fork changes. Felipe advocates for consensus following the current line of discussions and tests carried out by experts, with important developers having the most weight in discussions. However, concerns have been raised about whether users truly have control over the protocol.Keagan proposes a different method for measuring user support through transactions signaling in favor of an upgrade. This proposal aims to address the breakdown in civility around the debate on soft-fork activation by providing a sybil-resistant mechanism for measuring social consensus. However, there are concerns that such a system could be easily manipulated and lead to false consensus.The author proposes a mechanism for getting capital into the process of consensus measurement that is measurable completely en-protocol and does not require trust in institutions that fork futures would. This mechanism could be an auxiliary feature of the soft fork deployment scheme chosen, making it something that can be neatly packaged all together with the deployment itself. There are potential tweaks to the design proposed, including whether to include a notion of negative signaling and whether miner signaling must be congruent with X% of transactions. Anticipated objections include the claim that signaling isn't voting, but the lack of ability to measure consensus currently makes this objection unhelpful. Another objection is that the proposal is "pay to play," which would allow the wealthy to make consensus decisions. The author agrees that wealth should not be able to strong-arm decision making and sees the proposed mechanism as an improvement over the current situation where publicly influential people decide consensus.Enforcing this proposal requires its own soft fork, which the author acknowledges. One concern raised is that CoinJoin pool operators and L2 protocol implementations would have power over deciding consensus, but the author sees this as an improvement over the status quo. Another concern is that the proposal encourages spam, but the author argues that if fees are paid, it is not spam.The biggest question posed by the author is whether a scheme like this affords a better view into consensus than we have today. Other questions include whether the mechanism can be gamed to give us a worse view into consensus, whether it measures the right thing, and whether a BIP spec should be written to detail out the proposal. Ultimately, the Bitcoin community must answer fundamental questions surrounding the soft-fork activation process to ensure that technical consensus aligns with user consensus.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T19:48:51.461620+00:00