Author: Jameson Lopp 2017-06-14 17:20:32
Published on: 2017-06-14T17:20:32+00:00
The conversation on the bitcoin-dev mailing list started with Zheming Lin's proposal to solve the issue of passive and lazy consensus upgrades for non-mining wallet nodes. Gregory Maxwell, another member of the community, pointed out that the white paper actually states that users need to enforce the system's rules broadly, not just miners. The discussion then moved towards the misconception that the white paper refers to majority hashpower needing to be honest when it comes to choosing the consensus rules they wish to enforce. It was clarified that Bitcoin is not a democracy, and once a feature has been vetted and the code is deployed, miners may signal that they are ready to enforce new rules. The conversation also explored the question of whether bitcoin developers, users, holders, service providers, and miners still have faith in the majority of miners as designed in the white paper. In response, it was suggested that if users do not trust the majority miners, they can have their fork that gets rid of miners. Alternatively, if they do trust the majority miners, they can stay and follow the vote for upcoming protocol upgrades. The conversation also touched upon the fact that many miners have the most severe form of passive behavior, which is not running a node at all but simply selling their hash power to pools. Maxwell argued that slow upgrades are not necessarily a problem, and upgrading too fast can jeopardize reliability. He cited examples of other major internet protocols where upgrades happen slower than the entire life of Bitcoin so far, and none of them have the consistency challenges of Bitcoin or as much risk of irreparable financial loss if things go wrong. The conversation ended with the suggestion that a common understanding of Bitcoin be established through the white paper.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T02:36:16.433891+00:00