Author: Pieter Wuille 2015-06-20 17:13:06
Published on: 2015-06-20T17:13:06+00:00
Pieter, a Bitcoin developer, has expressed his opinion on the hard fork proposals that involve a block version vote. He believes that this is a bad idea regardless of what the hard fork is. The purpose of a hard fork is to ask the whole community to change their full nodes to new code, and the trigger mechanism is to establish when that has happened. Using a 95% threshold implies that the fork can happen when at least 5% of miners have not upgraded, which means the old chain can keep growing and confuse old non-miner nodes as well.Pieter suggests that the fork should be scheduled only when one is certain that nodes have upgraded, and the risk for a fork will be gone. If everyone has upgraded, no vote is necessary, and if nodes have not, it remains risky to fork them off. He understands that a hashrate vote is an easy way to keep humans in the loop, but he recommends using a minimum timestamp for upgrade and a 100% threshold afterwards. He argues that miners would be asked to not make blocks that violate the changed rule before they are reasonably sure that everyone has upgraded. However, he believes that this does not gain anything over just using a 100% threshold, as how would they be reasonably sure everyone has upgraded while blocks created by non-upgraded miners are still being created.In summary, Pieter suggests using a timestamp switchover for a hard fork, or adding a block voting threshold as a means to keep humans in the loop, but if you do, use 100% as the threshold.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T20:48:26.973785+00:00