Author: jl2012 2016-02-04 17:56:42
Published on: 2016-02-04T17:56:42+00:00
Gavin Andresen, a Bitcoin developer, has expressed his opinion that BIP is unnecessary. He disagrees with points two and three of the proposal, which are: "Full nodes and SPV nodes following original consensus rules may not be aware of the deployment of a hardfork. They may stick to an economic-minority fork and unknowingly accept devalued legacy tokens" and "In the case which the original consensus rules are also valid under the new consensus rules, users following the new chain may unexpectedly reorg back to the original chain if it grows faster than the new one. People may find their confirmed transactions becoming unconfirmed and lose money." Gavin argues that if a hardfork is deployed by increasing the version number in blocks, Full and SPV nodes should notice they are seeing up-version blocks and warn users they are using obsolete software. However, supporters of the BIP argue that in the case of a hardfork, the consequence of failing to upgrade to the economic majority fork is fatal, even if an user waits for 1000 confirmations. Moreover, there is also a risk of having two economically active forks. Therefore, wallets should stop accepting and sending tx after a hardfork bit is detected and wait for user's instructions. Regarding point three of the proposal, Gavin states that if a hard or soft fork uses a 'grace period,' then there is essentially no risk that a reorg will happen past the triggering block. A block-chain re-org of two thousand or more blocks on the main Bitcoin chain is unthinkable, and the reaction to such a drastic event would certainly be a hastily imposed checkpoint to get everybody back onto the chain that everybody was using for economic transactions. However, he believes that the "triggering block" mentioned is not where the hardfork starts. Using BIP101 as an example, the hardfork starts when the first >1MB is mined. For people who failed to upgrade, the "grace period" is always zero, which is the moment they realize a hardfork. Gavin concludes that he does not think the proposed mechanism (a negative-version-number-block) is necessary and that the keep-it-simple principle applies.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T03:37:15.163603+00:00