Author: Jared Lee Richardson 2017-06-07 21:09:04
Published on: 2017-06-07T21:09:04+00:00
A new Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) has been introduced to reduce the risk of chain split for BIP148. The proposed solution is a split protection soft fork, which requires miners to coordinate and activate the existing segwit deployment with less than 95% hashpower before BIP148 activation. The purpose of this BIP is to allow miners to defend themselves with minimal risk if the majority of miners do so. Regular users need not concern themselves with this release as only miners would need to upgrade. However, some miners/pools who are not actively following the forums, news, or discussions may be difficult to reach and communicate with in time, especially those with language barriers. Those who are not signaling segwit currently or are running an older software version will have their blocks continuously and constantly orphaned, but may not have any alarms or notifications set up for such an unexpected failure. This could be a harsh price to pay.The BIP uses IsSuperMajority() to activate soft forks, lowering the signaling threshold while it is being deployed in a backwards compatible way. A BIP8 style timeout is also used to ensure compatibility with BIP148 and mandatory signaling activates regardless of miner signaling levels. The existing "segwit" deployment can be activated without needing to release a new deployment by orphaning non-signaling blocks during the BIP9 bit 1 "segwit" deployment. This method will ensure that there is no chain split as we approach BIP148 activation. References include mailing list discussions, BIPs related to version bits, pay to script hash, reduced threshold segwit MASF, segregated witness, transaction signature verification, dealing with dummy stack element malleability, mandatory activation of segwit deployment, and segregated witness second deployment. The document is dual licensed as BSD 3-clause and Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal. The bitcoin-dev mailing list is where these discussions are taking place.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T01:49:42.685515+00:00