Author: Matt Corallo 2020-07-14 20:46:06
Published on: 2020-07-14T20:46:06+00:00
In a recent post on Bitcoin-dev, Matt Corallo expressed his disappointment with the discussion of naive flag day fork activation in the form of BIP 9. He argued that activation of forks sets a community understanding and culture around how changes to Bitcoin should be made. Two approaches have been proposed for activating Taproot, a proposed Bitcoin update: BIP 8 and a "decreasing threshold" approach.The design constraints for activating Taproot are that it should activate quickly if everyone cooperates and there are no obvious exploits, contingency plans should be in place to discourage attacks on Bitcoin, and code should not cause people to fall out of consensus. Corallo acknowledges significant outreach efforts and design work to ensure Taproot is broadly acceptable to Bitcoin users but notes that not all Bitcoin users are aware of these efforts or their results. Additionally, he expresses concern over the optics that set the stage for how future changes are made to Bitcoin purely because miners may be too busy with other things to upgrade their nodes.Anthony Towns proposed two plausible ways to activate soft forks in the future: Luke's recent update to BIP 8 and Towns' own approach based on Matt's method, which gradually decreases the threshold during the second signaling period. While acknowledging the merit in decreasing the activation threshold during the second signaling period, Corallo argues that to not make every attempt to distance the activation method from the public perception unilateral activation is a mistake.The author suggests using BIP 8 with mandatory activation disabled in bitcoin core, being prepared to update the BIP 8 parameters if there are no reasonable objections after nine months, changing the dec-threshold proposal to be compatible with BIP 8 as an extra contingency plan, supporting miners coordinating via BIP 91 to bring activation forward or de-risk BIP 8 mandatory activation, improving BIP 8 before deploying it, ensuring the underlying soft fork makes sense and is well-implemented, and continuing to talk to people to address any reasonable objections. The author acknowledges that activating Taproot may not go smoothly and advocates starting with a simple approach and being ready to adapt if things start to go wrong. Overall, coordination and communication will be key to successfully activating Taproot.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T23:38:33.618579+00:00