Published on: 2017-02-05T16:26:30+00:00
In a recent post on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, John Hardy has proposed a solution to the issue of only miners being able to signal support for changes to Bitcoin through BIP9. Currently, the rest of the community is not able to participate in consensus, and other methods of assessing community support are easily manipulated through Sybil. Hardy's proposal suggests using the output address of a transaction to signal support for a particular proposal, drawing inspiration from hashcash and vanity addresses.The idea behind this proposal is that generating an address with four consecutive case-insensitive characters would require approximately 34^4 attempts, which can be done in less than a second on typical hardware. The popularity of a proposal could then be measured by the fee paid per voting kb, weighted by popularity. This approach would provide an accessible way for the entire economic community to signal their support within transactions without requiring a hard fork or increasing the size of transactions.However, there are potential challenges with this system. It could be easily gamed by spammers and miners who have control over which transactions they include in their blocks. Additionally, existing and normal transactions may collide with these schemes, and most wallets do not currently have a straightforward way of supporting this method. Censorship by miners is also identified as a problem.Despite these limitations, Hardy's proposal offers an accessible and cost-effective way for the entire economic community to participate in signaling their support for changes in Bitcoin. If considered effective, it could also be used to activate changes in the future.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T19:30:29.017919+00:00