User Activated Soft Fork Split Protection

Summary:

Bitcoin developers are proposing a user-activated soft fork (UASF) called "split protection" to speed up the activation of Segregated Witness (SegWit), a proposed protocol upgrade for the Bitcoin network. The proposal aims to eliminate the risk of a chain split and allows a simple majority of miners to coordinate activation of the existing SegWit deployment with less than 95% hashpower before the August 1st BIP148 activation date, preventing a potential chain split ahead of BIP148 activation. While this BIP is active, all blocks must set the nVersion header top three bits to 001 together with bit field (1> existing segwit deployment). Blocks that do not signal as required will be rejected.This technique can lower the signaling threshold of a soft fork while it is in the process of being deployed in a backwards compatible way, providing a risk mitigation measure that miners can safely deploy. The primary goal of this BIP is to reduce the chance of an extended chain split as much as possible.The context also includes a list of Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) related to SegWit, including BIP141, which outlines the SegWit consensus layer; BIP143, which details transaction signature verification for the Version 0 Witness Program; BIP147, which deals with dummy stack element malleability; BIP148, which mandates the activation of SegWit deployment; and BIP149, which proposes a second deployment of SegWit.According to the SegWit benefits listed on the Bitcoin Core website, the protocol upgrade would improve the efficiency and security of Bitcoin transactions by separating signature data from transaction data. This would increase the capacity of each block in the blockchain and reduce the risk of certain types of attacks.The document containing these BIPs is licensed under both BSD 3-clause and Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal and was shared on the bitcoin-dev mailing list.

Updated on: 2023-06-12T01:57:16.968203+00:00