Author: Tier Nolan 2015-06-16 11:01:21
Published on: 2015-06-16T11:01:21+00:00
On June 16, 2015, Venzen sent an email to Mike Hearn urging him to cease his activity of a unilateral hard-fork, stating that he was damaging FOSS governance protocol that required methodical collaborative work and due process of change implementation by consensus. The principle of open-source software allows anyone to fork the code if they wish, meaning that if a project dies or some of the developers want to take things in a different direction, they can, and users can decide which version they prefer. However, the blockchain is also valuable in the case of Bitcoin, and simply splitting into two projects is not possible for it. There is no clear way to make the decision once and for all, and agreed set rules for hard forks are difficult to establish since it is hard to have rules about changing fundamental rules. The discussion would have already ended if there were a clear way to make this decision once and for all. Therefore, using the soft fork rules with a higher threshold than 95% plus a delay is a reasonable compromise on hard fork rules. It would be nice to include users of the software too, and Peter Todd’s suggestion of encoding a vote in transactions is a step toward that. If miners vote over 95% for the fork, users could still refuse to accept the change. Once miner acceptance is achieved, only version 5 and 6 blocks are allowed, and the split between version 5 and 6 blocks should be roughly in proportion to the number of transactions of each kind produced. 75% of miners can kill the fork by producing version 4 blocks, but 95% is needed for acceptance, and even then, transaction volume needs to support the fork.Venzen pointed out that Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen do not own Bitcoin, as nobody does, so there is no court of final appeal. However, Mike Hearn was generating antagonism wherever he went, and taking Bitcoin away from the community in anger would not solve the problem, and it would be like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. They are still suggesting some kind of fork threshold process or at least a suggestion that miners vote in favour if their system requires 95% miner approval.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T23:12:21.667426+00:00