Author: Eric Voskuil 2021-02-28 20:19:59
Published on: 2021-02-28T20:19:59+00:00
In order to change consensus rules, there are three options: hard fork, soft fork, and 51% attack. However, as no one can assume 100% explicit adoption of any rule change, even a 51% attack may fail. Miner signaling provides some level of assurance that it will be successful, and this level of assurance is increased by adoption of a higher than majority threshold. The majority of those who mine can choose to enforce censorship at any time they want as they have the power based on their own capital invested. Similarly, the economy (those who accept bitcoin) can enforce any rule change it wants to, and it can do so at any level of participation that wants to go along. If the objective is to produce a rule change while avoiding a chain split, 50% is a much lower bar than 100%. Most of the discussion has been focused on who is in charge, but Bitcoin requires no identity, and nobody is in charge.On Feb 28, 2021, Jeremy via bitcoin-dev wrote that miners still can generate invalid blocks as a result of SPV mining, and it could be profitable to do "bad block enhanced selfish mining" to take advantage of it. It is still possible that an un-upgraded miner will fail part 3, and attempting to accommodate un-upgraded miners leads to some nasty oscillating hashrate being optimal. Mandatory signaling isn't just a flag day, and releasing a flag day without releasing the LOT=true code leading up to that flag day means that clients would not be fully compatible with an early activation that could be proposed before the flag day is reached. BIP-8 is partially in service of "early activation," but a fixed activation date may be largely superior for business purposes, software engineering schedules, etc. Overall, it was agreed that all the contention around LOT makes a flag day look not so bad, and something closer to a flag day might not be so bad either for future forks as well. However, given the appetite for early activation, if a flag day is desired, LOT=true is the best option at this time.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T18:43:48.633826+00:00