Author: Mike Hearn 2015-06-16 11:29:31
Published on: 2015-06-16T11:29:31+00:00
The question at hand is how to deal with security and incident response during the deployment of the unilateral hard-fork for Bitcoin XT. According to Mike Hearn, both he and Gavin are experienced in responding to serious security incidents and have been on the bitcoin-security mailing list for years. They plan to deal with security and incident response in the same way as before because XT is essentially Core plus a few patches. In the past, they have dealt with issues such as the accidental bdb hard fork and the discovery that Android phones had little entropy in them causing different devices to generate the same keys. Hearn organized a co-ordinated crash rollout of multiple wallets across the Bitcoin ecosystem due to this issue. Hearn believes that they will manage to deal with security and incident response during the deployment of the hard-fork. XT will rebase on top of Core and follow its releases for as long as there seems to be interest in bigger blocks and as long as Hearn has the time, energy, and interest. If the >1mb chain wins, then Core will have to adopt the new ruleset or simply stop being relevant because it will have no users. In terms of the risk involved with the hard fork, Hearn believes it's not as risky as some people think. The patch that Gavin is working on requires both a miner majority and has a date trigger in it, which is similar to previous forks. There will be sufficient consensus beforehand, messages printed to the node logs, announcements in various places, and so on.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T23:13:36.191348+00:00