Author: Eric Voskuil 2021-06-26 21:43:55
Published on: 2021-06-26T21:43:55+00:00
The recent controversy over upgrade mechanisms for the non-controversial taproot upgrade has led to new proposals being made. BIP8 LOT=True ensures miners cannot block an upgrade entirely, but they can still slow it down. Softforks are coordinated between users, not miners, and miner involvement is only necessary to set the bit in the header. A proposal by Billy Tetrud suggests using trinary version signaling instead of binary signaling for soft fork upgrades. This allows for three signaling states: actively support the change, actively oppose the change, or not signaling (neither supporting nor opposing). With this additional information, non-contentious upgrades can be released much quicker. For contentious upgrades, miners who oppose the change are incentivized to update their software to a version that can actively signal opposition to the change. The more opposition there is, the higher the threshold necessary to lock in the upgrade. This gives an incentive for lazy miners to upgrade if they actually oppose the change while allowing them to remain lazy without slowing down the soft fork activation much. Tetrud believes that now is the right time to discuss new soft fork upgrade mechanisms with no pressing soft fork upgrades ready to deploy.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T23:37:55.746859+00:00