Author: jl2012 at xbt.hk 2015-07-22 17:00:41
Published on: 2015-07-22T17:00:41+00:00
The discussion on a proposed hard fork to increase Bitcoin's block size has raised concerns about the security of the chain if a supermajority of miners do not support it. Peter Todd warns that without miner support, the chain is insecure and can be attacked. He also criticizes BIP102, calling it poorly designed and suggesting that Jeff Garzik may be trolling or incompetent. To avoid any risk of reorg, the hard fork may require that the first block after a predetermined time must be version 0, which is only an exception for the flag block. Alternatively, the flag block may be required to be larger than 1MB. This approach does not require additional exceptions in consensus rules, but it could be troublesome in coding as the miner may need to artificially inflate the size of the flag block. Old nodes will not accept the new chain because it violates BIP66/block size limit, while new nodes will not accept the old chain because its flag block is not version 0/larger than 1MB. If all major merchants and exchanges agree to upgrade, then this is checkpointing in a decentralized way, and the old chain can be left behind forever. Miner support is less relevant, as it is a no-brainer for them to support the new chain unless they don't want to sell or spend their bitcoin or give up mining after heavily investing in ASIC.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T02:54:06.222606+00:00