Author: Potter QQ 2015-06-01 14:50:28
Published on: 2015-06-01T14:50:28+00:00
The email conversation is a discussion on the use of the median time and nVersion soft-fork mechanisms for Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs). The median time mechanism allows hashing power to show what time they think it is, while the nVersion soft-fork mechanism enables hashing power to indicate which features they want to support. The deadline for BIPs need not be set accurately; a roughly six-month deadline should suffice, and a majority of miners are needed to abuse the median time, which is already a miner poll. Increasing the number of blocks used in the median could reduce "noise". Each bit is assigned to a particular BIP for a specific range of times or blocks, and if block numbers were used for the deadline, one only needs to check the block index for the deadline block. The block at height deadline would indicate whether the BIP was locked in. Block time could still be used as long as the block height was set after that. For each block height, there is a set of known BIP bits that are allowed, and once the final deadline passes, the expected mask is zeros. There was some ambiguity in phrasing regarding changing the 95% rule, where 75% is needed to start applying it, and 95% to start rejecting blocks that do not apply it.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:35:23.915770+00:00