Author: James Hilliard 2017-06-13 08:37:43
Published on: 2017-06-13T08:37:43+00:00
In this email conversation between Zheming Lin and James Hilliard, the topic of protocol upgrades through miners vote was discussed. It was explained that activation only requires a majority of miners to signal, and after 51% signaling, all miners will upgrade within the first grace period. However, false signaling can occur from the minority group, which may cause issues. The node should decide to follow the protocol upgrade or not, but they can’t just be passive and do nothing. The choice is always provided. During the first two grace periods, non-mining nodes will not be affected. After two grace periods, all nodes must be upgraded. Otherwise, they cannot send transactions or get any confirmations. Protocol upgrades in the future can be bonded with the upgrades of nodes, and the upgrades activate through miners vote independently. There would be enough time for nodes to be upgraded in order to support new protocols.The risks of this method were also discussed. For example, the fluctuation of the hashing power will affect the result of the longest chain. Higher activating requirement means a lower risk of temporary fork. Miners could simply signal to avoid being orphaned, but from the perspective of non-mining wallet nodes, they can't distinguish the false signal from the true signal. Non-mining wallet nodes could false signal without supporting the new protocol, but genuine nodes should follow the proven result provided by miners vote. In addition, miners and non-mining nodes could conspire to fork using old protocol consensus, which can't be eliminated.Lastly, it was mentioned that miners need to vote unbiasedly under the condition that most users are not affected by protocol upgrading. But how to make the method compatible with SPY mining was still a problem, as well as how to provide an incentive to no-validating SPY miner. Overall, the implementation of this method was still TBD.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T02:38:14.142267+00:00