User Activated Soft Fork Split Protection

Summary:

A new Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) called "Split Protection" has been proposed by James Hilliard to prevent a potential chain split caused by the BIP148 soft fork. BIP148 is essentially BIP91 but using BIP8 instead of BIP9 with a lower activation threshold and immediate mandatory signalling lock-in. The proposal enables miners to activate SegWit mandatory signalling and prevent a potential chain split ahead of the August 1st BIP148 activation date by signaling for split protection.To reduce the chance of an extended chain split as much as possible, this BIP activates using a simple miner majority of 65% over a 504 block interval rather than a higher percentage. This BIP also allows miners to signal their intention to run BIP148 in order to prevent a chain split. However, the proposal has been criticized for being too rushed and forcing miners to upgrade quickly or get orphaned, especially since some miners are unlikely to deploy it until it comes bundled with some version of the Segwit2x HF code.Some have also questioned how much hard evidence there is that there will be significant disruption if miners ignore both this and BIP148, which currently has ~0% hashrate support. Unless the HF code is ready and agreed on soon (say by July 1), the main chain should remain backwards-compatible, especially if evidence of miner support for BIP148 doesn't materialize soon. The proposal has been received with mixed responses, with proponents arguing that it offers a good solution to the potential chain split problem while opponents believe it is too rushed and risks causing more harm than good.In addition to the above context, a mailing list post regarding Segwit was provided. The post provides information on the benefits of Segwit and mentions that the document is dual licensed under BSD 3-clause and Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal. The post concludes with links to the bitcoin-dev mailing list and its subscription page.

Updated on: 2023-06-12T01:48:14.832165+00:00