Author: Jonathan Toomim 2015-12-27 00:03:58
Published on: 2015-12-27T00:03:58+00:00
In an email correspondence by Pieter Wuille on December 26, 2015, he expressed his opinion about not relying solely on miners to make judgment calls regarding forking off nodes that do not pay attention or disagree with the change. He believes that the consensus system of the Bitcoin network should be hard to change and is proposing that miners serve as an extra layer of safety rather than being the sole party to make judgment calls. Wuille suggested a grace period of one or two months after a majority of nodes and miners have upgraded, which should be more than enough time for users to download a new version of the software. He also suggested that the use of the Alert System would be justified in the weeks preceding the hard fork and proposed creating an "Upgrade now!" message that the new version would ignore and set it to broadcast forever to all old nodes.Nodes that disagree with the change are welcome to continue running the old version and watch the small fork if they so choose. However, their numbers should be small if it is an uncontroversial hard fork, but they won't be zero, and that's fine. The software supports this (except for peer discovery, which can get a little bit tricky in hardfork scenarios for the minority fork). Miners have no ethical obligation to protect individuals who choose not to follow consensus.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T02:10:21.794623+00:00