Author: Corey Haddad 2015-12-17 07:54:41
Published on: 2015-12-17T07:54:41+00:00
A proposal for a planned hardfork, similar to certain softforks, has been put forward. While users will have some reduction in security, they will not be defenseless. In the event of a hardfork, the old chain will see mining almost stop and blocks would take hours to days apart. Six confirmations would certainly take days. If the fork is scheduled at the beginning of a difficulty period, the old chain would almost certainly not even ever make it to the next retargeting. There still needs to be a targeted attack by a fraudster on an unaware node operator to fall victim. Someone somewhere will probably get scammed as a result of a hardfork, but at this point in Bitcoin's development, it is still in beta and we can't allow the software to become hamstrung out of fear that some inattentive user might bungle their security. There are two proposals on the table: SWSF (segwit soft fork) with 1MB virtual block limit, approximately equals to 2MB actual limit and BIP102: 2MB actual limit. The biggest advantage of SWSF is its softfork nature, while the advantage of BIP102 is that it is a very simple hardfork and could be deployed with ISM in less than a month. Hardfork is not a totally unknown territory; BIP50 was a hardfork and everything completed in 5 months without any panic or chaos. Another experience is from BIP66, which was a softfork, and 4600 out of 5090 nodes indicate BIP66 support. With the evidence from BIP50 and BIP66, a 5 months pre-announcement is good enough for BIP102. The primary proposal includes formally consulting the major miners and merchants if they support an one-off rise to 2MB, releasing 0.11.3 with BIP102 with ISM vote requiring 80% of hashing power between 16 - 31 Jan 2016 and allowing the first day a 2MB block may be allowed on 1 Jun 2016. Before 31 Dec 2016, SWSF would be released. The secondary proposal includes working on SWSF in a turbo mode and having a deadline of 1 Jun 2016, releasing SWSF on that date, and pushing an urgent BIP102 if things become really bad. A clear decision and road map could be made now, as this topic has been discussed to death.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T02:16:15.637798+00:00