Proposal: Scheduled Activation with Potential Miner-Signaled Delay

Summary:

The proposed activation procedure for new consensus rules is a more nuanced approach than the divisive "Lock on Timeout" binary option. The proposal uses BIP8's optional "Lock on Timeout" feature, which is essentially an improved version of the flag-day activation proposed in BIP148. This alternative proposal allows miners to delay the activation of new consensus rules until they have solved their technological and validation issues. The proposed upgrade may be further delayed or postponed by miners signaling that they are "not ready", instead of signaling when they are "ready". After a pre-starting period of 6 months, if the vast majority of miners have successfully upgraded within the pre-starting period, the first 2016 block period will lock-in the upgrade without any delay or postponement. The main goal of this proposal is to allow an upgrade to proceed at a reasonable pace while allowing miners having difficulties to explicitly notify the community through signaling their lack of readiness, thus triggering a delay or entirely postponing the deployment. This proposal would help the miners implement the technological aspects of this network upgrade.The proposal specifies an alternative to BIP8, where the activation may be delayed a limited number of times or postponed (and ultimately fail deployment), unlike previous proposals where miners signaled that they are "ready" for the consensus change. The proposal addresses the issue of confusion between signaling readiness of the miner software and signaling political support of the consensus change by requiring miners to explicitly signal that they are "not ready" for the proposed network upgrade. This proposal uses 2016 block intervals and the same set of intervals used for difficulty adjustment calculations. There will be exactly 26 intervals to attempt activation, and the upgrade becomes activated if less than 126 blocks signal "not ready" in any interval or 126 or more blocks signal "not ready", but less than 1008 blocks signal "not ready" for a total of 14 intervals. The upgrade fails if 1008 or more blocks signal "not ready", and 126 or more blocks signal "not ready" in all remaining intervals.

Updated on: 2023-06-14T18:43:03.285125+00:00