Author: Zheming Lin 2017-06-13 06:50:26
Published on: 2017-06-13T06:50:26+00:00
In an email exchange between James Hilliard and Zheming Lin, a proposal was made to incorporate any upgrade that affects non-mining nodes. The motivation behind this proposal was the fact that the original Bitcoin consensus did not consider wallet nodes resulting in passive and lazy upgrading of these nodes during disagreements in the direction of the upgrade leading to miners having no way to ensure widespread acceptance of the chain being extended by the wallet nodes. This adversely affected the security of the wallet nodes since they were not able to fully validate and choose whether or not to accept a particular chain which is an important part of Bitcoin's security model. The proposed method provides additional incentives for wallet nodes to upgrade their protocol which will enable miners' nodes to work on the longest chain used by other wallet nodes in the broader bitcoin sphere.The deployment of the protocol upgrade will be phased over three stages with the optional fourth stage to integrate codes of the protocol upgrade. After 55% miners signal using BIP9, the next stage is activated. After a first grace period of 2016 blocks, miners broadcasting blocks with new versionbits in block headers will orphan blocks with old versionbits. After 4032 continuous blocks with new versionbits, mining nodes will start to refuse transactions with old versionbits. Only transactions with new versionbits can be relayed and included in blocks. Transactions with old versionbits can be safely purged from memory pools. The activation only requires majority miners signal.There are several benefits to this proposal including minimizing the possibility of delaying network upgrades by controlling a small number of hashing power, providing enough time for users to upgrade their wallets, and protecting the ledger of wallet nodes. The proposed method for protocol upgrades through miners voting is not a compulsory change in the consensus, but just prepares nodes for possible upcoming changes. After two grace periods, all nodes must be upgraded to support new protocols, otherwise they cannot send transactions or get any confirmations. The ledger in non-mining wallet nodes is reserved and users of off-chain wallet services can decide whether or not to follow the service providers after receiving public notifications. Protocol upgrades could be bonded with the upgrades of nodes and activated through miners vote independently.Risks include fluctuation of hashing power affecting the longest chain, false signals from miners and non-mining wallet nodes, and the possibility of miners and non-mining nodes conspiring to fork using old protocol consensus. However, if the majority of miners are honest, false signal won't be a problem. Miners should vote unbiasedly under the condition that most users are not affected by protocol upgrading. There is no implementation plan available yet.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T02:33:59.039976+00:00