Author: Nadav Ivgi 2022-04-28 00:16:57
Published on: 2022-04-28T00:16:57+00:00
In 2017, during the block size wars, a concept of using time-locked weighted voting as a mechanism to gauge community/hodler sentiment was brought up. The idea involves the user locking up bitcoins with an OP_CSV while committing to a statement, and votes being weighted. This has some advantages over the more naive coin weighting scheme used at the time, including the handicap principle, which suggests that there's a real cost attached to voting in the form of lost liquidity, making for more reliable signaling, and giving more influence to long-term hodlers that possess strong confidence in bitcoin. The proposal does not see this as 'voting' despite calling it that and is not advocating to use it as an authoritative decision-making voting mechanism or as part of an activation mechanism, only possibly as one more market signal to look at among many.In a recent post on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Keagan McClelland proposed a means of measuring user support for proposed soft-fork changes through a combination of rejection of blocks that don't follow rules and paying fees for transaction inclusion. McClelland suggests combining these in such a way that transactions themselves can signal for upgrade. 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. There are many potential tweaks to the design proposed, including whether to include a notion of negative signaling, make it such that miner signaling must be congruent with >X% of transactions, and enforcing this proposal requires its own soft fork. There are also some anticipated objections, such as the proposal being just a proposal for "pay to play." However, the status quo seems even worse where publicly influential people decide consensus in such a way where they accrue ammunition, creating really bad long-term balances of power. Some questions posed to the forum include whether a scheme like this affords us a better view into consensus than we have today, can it be gamed to give us a worse view into consensus, and should a BIP spec'ing this out in detail be written?
Updated on: 2023-06-15T19:45:22.406265+00:00