Author: Roy Badami 2015-06-20 18:42:51
Published on: 2015-06-20T18:42:51+00:00
The context revolves around a debate on the level of consensus required for a hard fork to trigger in the Bitcoin network. Gavin Andresen had initially advocated for either a 99% or 100% buy-in by miners for the hard fork to be triggered. However, Pieter Wuille argues that using a 95% threshold, as some proposals suggest, is not ideal as it means the fork can happen when at least 5% of miners have not upgraded, which implies that some full nodes have not upgraded either, and the old chain can keep growing too, confusing old non-miner nodes as well. Wuille suggests that the fork should be scheduled only when one is certain nodes will have upgraded, and the risk for a fork will be gone. He recommends using a timestamp switchover for the hard fork or adding a block voting threshold as a means to keep humans in the loop but using 100% as the threshold. Roy expresses his support for a block size increase but wishes that more energy would have gone into discussing the level of consensus required for the hard fork rather than the block size itself. The purpose of the trigger mechanism is to establish when the whole community has changed their full nodes to new code, and the risk for a fork will be gone. Using a supermajority threshold is now favored, perhaps because people believe that level of consensus is unachievable.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T00:05:34.255793+00:00