Author: John Hardy 2017-02-03 00:13:04
Published on: 2017-02-03T00:13:04+00:00
The current way to signal support for changes to Bitcoin is limited to miners through BIP9. However, this has been criticized as the rest of the community cannot participate in consensus, and other methods of assessing community support are easily manipulated. To solve this, a proposal has been made to allow community support to be signaled through transactions without requiring a hard fork or increasing the size of transactions. This would involve using the output address of a transaction to signal support for a particular proposal, with the last 4 characters used for this purpose. This could be measured by fee paid per voting kb and weighted by popularity. However, there are potential issues such as censorship by particular miners and attempts to manipulate results. Despite these limitations, it offers an accessible and cost-effective way for the entire economic community to signal their support within transactions. It could also be used to activate changes in the future if considered effective.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T00:50:14.517168+00:00