User Activated Soft Fork Split Protection

Summary:

The bitcoin community is currently divided over the upcoming BIP148 protocol. BIP148 presents a risky chain split, which has caused concern amongst some members of the community. The main fear is that economics and hashpower will determine the fate of the minority chain. If there's no majority consensus, miners will choose to mine whichever chain is the most profitable. On the other hand, supporters of BIP148 argue that it provides risk mitigation measures that miners can deploy.Despite this, Jared Lee Richardson believes that BIP148 may not be worth the risk, as he feels it offers a false sense of safety that isn't guaranteed. He claims that any additional support for BIP148 could actually strengthen an extreme minority chain just days before SegWit is activated on both chains, potentially putting BIP148 supporters on the wrong side of two SegWit-activated chains.To prevent the possibility of an extended chain split, the User Activated Soft Fork Split Protection has been proposed as a coordination mechanism for miners ahead of BIP148 activation. This BIP allows for miner coordination to activate the existing segwit deployment using less than 95% hashpower before BIP148 activation.This BIP provides a method for rapid miner activation of SegWit mandatory signalling ahead of the BIP148 activation date. It also allows miners to signal their intention to run BIP148 in order to prevent a chain split. All blocks must set the nVersion header top 3 bits to 001 together with bit field (1> existing segwit deployment). Blocks that do not signal as required will be rejected.This BIP will be deployed by "version bits" with a 65% activation threshold BIP9 with the name "splitprotection" and using bit 2. It starts immediately and is a BIP8 style soft fork since mandatory signalling will start on midnight August 1st, 2017 regardless of whether or not this BIP has reached its signalling threshold. This BIP will cease to be active when segwit is locked-in.Users should either upgrade to split protection or wait for additional confirmations when accepting payments while this bip is active. Historically, IsSuperMajority() has been used to activate soft forks such as BIP66 with a mandatory signalling requirement for miners once activated, ensuring that miners are aware of new rules being enforced. This technique can be leveraged to lower the signalling threshold of a soft fork while it is in the process of being deployed in a backwards compatible way. A majority of miners may have a method that ensures no chain split as we approach BIP148 activation. The document is dual licensed as BSD 3-clause and Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.The References section contains links to relevant mails, bip-0009, bip-0016, bip-0091, bip-0141, bip-0143, bip-0147, bip-0148, bip-0149, and Segwit benefits.

Updated on: 2023-06-12T01:58:04.248010+00:00