Author: James Hilliard 2017-06-14 00:23:06
Published on: 2017-06-14T00:23:06+00:00
A proposed method has been introduced to incentivize and protect both mining and non-mining nodes during protocol upgrading. The goal is to ensure that all miners upgrade by requiring a majority of miners to activate and orphan the minor after a grace period, setting new block versionbits. The first grace period will end with Nakamoto Consensus forcing all mining nodes upgraded to signal a new version of consensus. After the second grace period, mining nodes will only accept transactions with new versionbits, while transactions from nodes not upgrading will not be relayed nor included in blocks with new versionbits.This method can provide additional incentives for wallet nodes to upgrade the protocol while ensuring the asset security of wallet nodes. However, pre-signed time locked transactions may cause issues with this method. It is important for wallet nodes to have the ability to fully validate and choose whether or not to accept a particular chain as it is a crucial part of Bitcoin's security model.The proposed method is a product of collaboration between different interest groups in the Chinese bitcoin community. Its aim is to solve the problem of upgrading the consensus of wallet nodes passively and lazily by incentivizing them to upgrade the protocol. Once the wallet nodes upgrade their protocol, the miners' nodes can be guaranteed to work on the longest chain used by other wallet nodes in the broader Bitcoin sphere. There will be no persistent forks as protocol upgrades can be phased in under the Nakamoto Consensus.However, there are some risks associated with validationless mining, which is well known to be used by over half of mining pools to some degree. False signaling from miners could trick honest miners into forking off prematurely with a minority. The author advocates that resource requirements should be low enough that full validation remains possible for a large percentage of the economy.The proposed plan requires a majority of miners to signal for activation, and once 55% of mining nodes signal using BIP9, the next stage will be activated after 2016 blocks have passed. Mining nodes broadcasting blocks with new versionbits in block headers will orphan blocks with old versionbits. After 4032 continuous blocks with new versionbits, mining nodes will begin to refuse transactions with old versionbits, and only transactions with new versionbits can be relayed and included in blocks. Non-mining nodes have enough time to upgrade their software before the two grace periods end and all nodes must upgrade.Protocol upgrades in the future can be bonded with the upgrades of nodes, and the upgrades activate through miners vote independently. However, there are risks involved such as fluctuation of hashing power affecting the longest chain, miners and non-mining nodes conspiring to fork using old protocol consensus, and the possibility of miners signalling falsely to avoid being orphaned. The implementation of this plan is yet to be determined.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T02:39:05.436419+00:00