Published on: 2016-02-07T17:53:53+00:00
Luke Dashjr has shared a draft BIP for the Pre-BIP Growth Soft-hardfork. This BIP aims to implement proper merge-mining, as suggested by Satoshi, in order to expand the nonce space that miners can scan in-chip. It also proposes a method for safely deploying hardforks without leaving old nodes vulnerable to attack. Although the initial implementation of the BIP may be challenging, it will facilitate future hardforks.The proposal suggests including the median timestamp of the past 11 blocks after the block height in coinbase, which would serve as an activation threshold for consensus rule changes. Additionally, the BIP recommends treating witness commitment as a merge mined commitment. Miners are encouraged to ensure that the hardfork is accepted by the supermajority of the economy.The email accompanying the draft BIP discusses a specific implementation of the "nuclear option" soft fork. This involves adding fields to header 3 that can be expanded later, saving the need to immediately convert the merkle tree into a sum tree. The proposal also suggests having dedicated hard fork and soft fork counters, as well as a field for parallel soft forks. In response to hard forks, nodes would stall the chain, and the hard fork counter would determine if this action should be taken for all new hard forks going forward. If a hard fork occurs, transaction processing would be halted, and users informed. Non-upgraded miners could blacklist the hard forking block and continue mining on their own chain, while still giving users the option to accept or reject the hard fork.The author of the BIP wrote a draft a year ago, which aimed to achieve important objectives such as merge-mining, nonce space expansion, and safe deployment of hardforks. The author plans to revise and complete the BIP soon and welcomes suggestions for improvement. The link to the BIP can be found on GitHub.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T17:46:45.370934+00:00