Author: R E Broadley 2017-06-02 12:29:19
Published on: 2017-06-02T12:29:19+00:00
Miner signalling alone may not be enough to prevent two forks. The code needs to detect when this is happening and abort if it is clear that the signalling was dishonest. According to Sergio Demian Lerner, the 95% miner signalling is important to prevent two Bitcoin forks such as what happened with Ethereum HF and Ethereum Classic. Bitcoin's slow difficulty re-targeting algorithm means that a fork with just 95% miner support will initially be 5% slower, with an average block every 10 minutes and 30 seconds. However, the chain with 5% of the hashing power has a 20x capacity reduction and confirms transactions in 20x more time, leading the mempool to grow 400 times. Fees have increased 10x from the moment blocks were half full, to the moment blocks became saturated. A 6-block confirmation will take 20 hours in the original chain and the original chain will be in this almost useless slow state for an average of 2016 blocks, or 280 days. If the original blockchain hard-forks to re-adjust the difficulty, then it will just represent an alt-coin having 5% of Bitcoin community and it can't affect Bitcoin (the segwit2mb fork). Miners signalling they have upgraded by flipping a bit in the nVersion field has little relevance in a hard fork. If 100% of the hash power indicates they are running this proposal, but the nodes don't upgrade, it could lead to problems. However, there are ongoing discussions among developers about the best ways to prevent these issues and ensure a smooth transition.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T23:11:58.145145+00:00