Author: James Hilliard 2017-06-13 05:44:23
Published on: 2017-06-13T05:44:23+00:00
A Chinese Bitcoin community has proposed a method to incentivize and protect mining and non-mining nodes during protocol upgrading. This upgrade will achieve a broad deployment of the protocol upgrade. Wallet nodes being able to fully validate and choose whether or not to accept a particular chain is important for bitcoins security model. The protocol upgrade depends on its activate condition independently even after the change deployed among nodes.The activation of a new protocol upgrade in Bitcoin only requires majority miner signal, which is achieved at 55% hashpower. Soft forks can be implemented technically at 55% hashpower without an orphaning period, but this should not be used for controversial hard forks as it is easy for miners to false signal.After two grace periods, all nodes must be upgraded, or they cannot send transactions or get any confirmations. Backwards compatibility has been considered a good thing for consensus changes. The ledger in non-mining wallet nodes is honored and reserved.Fluctuations in hashing power can affect the result of the longest chain. Miners could false signal to avoid being orphaned, and non-mining wallet nodes cannot distinguish between the false and true signals, so they must upgrade assuming all signals are true. Non-mining wallet nodes could also false signal without supporting the new protocol, but genuine nodes should follow the proven result provided by the miners' vote.Lastly, there is a possibility that some miners and non-mining nodes could conspire to fork using old protocol consensus. While this cannot be eliminated, the benefit of these actors is reduced through most passive non-mining nodes being upgraded.Majority miners will activate this upgrade and orphan non-upgraded miners' blocks for the first grace period. Once the first grace period is over, all mining nodes will signal and upgrade to the latest version through the Nakamoto Consensus. After the second grace period, mining nodes will only accept new version transactions, making old version ones invalid. Non-mining nodes must upgrade their protocol to be compatible with new version transactions.Mining nodes signal using BIP9 and broadcast blocks with new versionbits in block headers after the first grace period of 2016 blocks. Transactions with old versionbits become invalid once the second grace period is over. Codes dealing with protocol upgrade can be integrated into the third stage. The protocol upgrade requires four stages to phase in.There are some risks associated with the activation process. Non-mining nodes are not affected during the first two grace periods, giving them enough time to upgrade their software. Versionbits are included in block headers and do not influence SPY mining. Chain wallets users will need to decide whether to migrate their accounts to on-chain wallets or follow the wallet service provider's declaration.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T02:33:10.742240+00:00