Author: Peter Todd 2019-08-16 16:06:50
Published on: 2019-08-16T16:06:50+00:00
In a post on bitcoin-dev, John Newbery made a statement that once a consensus change has been activated and buried by sufficient work, the height of that change is considered historic fact. However, the exact activation method is no longer of practical interest. This point was elaborated on in a subsequent post, which noted that it's difficult to measure the preferences of economically significant nodes in a decentralized network like Bitcoin. The post also raised the example of segwit activation at height 481,824 and how it's debatable whether that was due to BIP 9 version bits signaling, BIP 148 UASF, or a combination of both. The reason this is debatable is because soft-forks are backwards compatible and both BIP9 version bits signalling and BIP 148 UASF had the same basic effect: enforcing segwit. However, the BIP 148 UASF rejected blocks that didn't signal via the BIP9 version bits. It was observed that 100% of known blocks produced after August 1st, 2017 have complied with segwit rules and the BIP9 signaling protocol for segwit. But it's unclear why this happened. It's possible that miners were running the BIP9 signaling Bitcoin Core release or UASF enforcing software, or a combination of both, or entirely different software.There's also the question as to why miners were producing segwit-compliant blocks. Perhaps they thought the majority of economically significant nodes would reject their blocks, or perhaps they just wanted to enforce segwit. These questions have plausible answers backed by evidence and argument, but there's no authority that can conclusively answer them due to Bitcoin's decentralized nature.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T21:01:15.780727+00:00