Author: Eric Lombrozo 2015-07-23 00:13:42
Published on: 2015-07-23T00:13:42+00:00
The discussion is about the ability of users to decide what their consensus parameters should be at runtime. The idea is to allow the user to decide between different chain params at runtime rather than forking the codebase and implementing their own changes. The coinparams_new branch does exactly this, adding a parameter for maximum block size. Chain params could be identical except for the value of some future event, in which case the configs would run identically until that point. Nevertheless, the idea of forking an existing blockchain without first securing overwhelming (near unanimous) consensus or having built a mechanism that can merge divergent chains gracefully, is discouraged. According to Mike Hearn, Bitcoin Core is running the Bitcoin economy, and its developers do have the authority to set its rules, enforced by the reality of ~100% market share and limited github commit access. However, if developers discourage anything that forks from the rules enforced by Bitcoin Core, they harm the network's ability to inform us of a failure to reflect user consensus. Ultimately, consensus is most strongly measured by user actions after software release.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T03:16:12.092445+00:00