Author: Eric Voskuil 2019-08-16 17:44:47
Published on: 2019-08-16T17:44:47+00:00
In a recent email exchange on bitcoin-dev mailing list, John Newbery mentioned that once a consensus change has been activated and buried by sufficient work, the height of that change is considered to be historic fact. However, the exact activation method is no longer of practical interest. Peter Todd reiterates that this is debatable because Bitcoin is a decentralized network and soft-forks are backwards compatible. It is difficult to measure the preferences of economically significant nodes and it's not possible to know why 100% of known blocks produced after August 1st 2017 have complied with segwit rules.The BIP9 version bits signalling and the BIP 148 UASF had the same basic effect of enforcing segwit. The BIP 148 UASF rejected blocks that didn't signal via the BIP9 version bits. Although we can observe that every block after August 1st 2017 complied with segwit rules and the BIP9 signalling protocol for segwit, strictly speaking, it is not clear why this happened. It is possible that miners were running the BIP9 signalling Bitcoin Core release around that time or they could have been running UASF enforcing software. It is also possible that there was a combination of both or entirely different software.Furthermore, there is a question as to why miners were producing segwit-compliant blocks. It is plausible that perhaps they thought the vast majority of economically significant nodes would reject their blocks or they just wanted to enforce segwit. These are all questions that have plausible answers, backed by evidence and argument. However, because Bitcoin is a decentralized network, no authority can tell you what the answers are.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T21:00:59.226081+00:00